Laing O’Rourke for Level Crossing Removal Authority
Lilydale Station
A welcoming transport hub that connects community and celebrates Lilydale’s heritage and future as a gateway to the Yarra Valley.
As part of the Victorian Government’s ambitious program to remove 85 of Melbourne’s most dangerous and congested level crossings, BKK Architects collaborated with Kyriacou Architects, Jacobs, and ASPECT Studios to reimagine Lilydale Station. Our design has elevated the railway line above Maroondah Highway, creating an open, street-level concourse below that functions as an integrated public space with multiple access points connecting into the urban fabric and welcoming pedestrians to flow through.
We delivered a contemporary new transport hub that maintains vital connections to Lilydale’s past while serving as a gateway to the Yarra Valley, offering better links between trains, buses, cars and bikes, and retaining the historic 1872 station building as part of the design by developing the new station to the north of the highway. Through materiality, form and integrated artwork, the station transcends its role as infrastructure to become a place-defining civic asset that democratises public space, enhances multi-modal transport efficiency, and celebrates its position at Melbourne’s eastern fringe.
Big Picture Thinking
We designed Lilydale Station alongside its sibling station at Mooroolbark, creating a line-wide identity for the end of the Lilydale line, while allowing each station to establish their own ‘personalities’. Both stations are deliberately anti-monumental, with the buildings “pulled apart” to create open, welcoming spaces that invite people in from all directions and become part of the community and established urban fabric. Both stations share a material language that reflects their urban fringe identity, combining the robustness of zinc cladding with the richness of hand-laid local Coldstream mudstone, popularly used throughout the Yarra Valley.
Recognising Lilydale’s history and importance as a metropolitan terminus and a gateway to the arts, tourism and bike trails of the Yarra Valley, our design approach sought to strengthen multi-modal transport connections. By elevating the railway line, we maintained vital road connections through Lilydale’s activity center, ensuring continued business from passing traffic while creating a street-level concourse beneath that feels part of the town fabric. This included locating a secondary station entrance at the southern side of Maroondah Highway to better accommodate car parking infrastructure and enable direct connections with the popular Warburton bike trail — a former railway line now serving cyclists and walkers.
Wind of Lilydale
The station’s 27m tower is a contemporary reimagining of the traditional station clocktower. But rather than a clock, it is topped with a new commission by Turkish-American artist Refik Anadol, an international leader in digital screen artworks. Anadol’s work combines media, science, technology and data in site-specific works.
The spectacular Wind of Lilydale could exist nowhere else. It is an artistic interpretation of local weather data, which is processed by a custom algorithm into a constantly changing visual pattern. It gathers and interprets weather data in real time so the pattern you see is the weather you’re experiencing.
Wind of Lilydale is Melbourne’s only permanent Anadol work, though other pieces have appeared in temporary exhibitions.
The tower and the artwork are a new landmark visible for kilometres around that signposts a gateway to the Yarra Valley and beyond. BKK worked with public art curators T Projects and advocated for the tower to be a public art opportunity.
More than a bridge
For us, the project was as much about urban design as infrastructure.
A crucial part of our job was working with the client (Level Crossing Removal Project) and stakeholders to design the best level crossing removal option for Lilydale as a place.
Lilydale station is the terminus of a long metropolitan line. The railway used to continue on, forking in one direction to Healesville (until 1980) and another to Warburton (until 1965).
The Lilydale township was therefore a tourist destination, its tearooms a delightful launching place for a Yarra Valley outing.
That tourism story faded when both lines were terminated at Lilydale, but the Warburton one has become a popular and scenic walking/cycling trail. Our new station has clear pedestrian links and caters well for cyclists moving between the platforms and the trail.
The bridge preserves that link with the historic station and the rural Yarra Valley food, wine and culture district. Our scheme also keeps the road running through the main Lilydale activity centre, connecting it to the community and bringing business from road traffic en route to the Yarra Valley.
Our station has a sibling: the new Mooroolbark Station, which we designed concurrently with Lilydale. Mooroolbark’s Station is smaller than Lilydale’s, but with the same materiality and elemental approach.
BKK’s other projects for the Level Crossing Removal Authority include at Mooroolbark Station, Melton Highway Melton, Merinda Park Station and Camms Road (both in Cranbourne), Calder Park Drive Keilor North, and South Gippsland Highway Dandenong.