Eglinton Crosstown LRT : New Stations Chase Sunlight
Sep 11
5 min read
Daylight falls straight down through slanted glass and lands on concrete the colour of wet stone. Toronto waited over a decade for this. Above and below Eglinton Avenue, a new kind of civic architecture now runs the length of the city: glass volumes, precast concrete envelopes, strands of orange marking the way.
Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Photography by Tom Arban
The Eglinton Crosstown LRT stretches about 19.5 km across Toronto, with 25 stations, 15 underground, and 10 at grade. It welcomed passengers on February 8, 2026.
Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker Benech served as Design Excellence Lead, defining the line’s overall vision, identity, and unique design language. The premise is simple: public transit can move people efficiently while also giving the city better civic space.
Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Photography by Tom Arban Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Photography by Tom Arban
With an estimated 50 million passengers per year, the Eglinton Crosstown LRT provides fast, reliable transit along Eglinton Avenue, linking neighbourhoods across Toronto.
The line grew out of Metrolinx's regional strategy, The Big Move, and counts among the city's largest transit infrastructure projects. However, its architectural ambition extends beyond moving trains.
The design treats the public realm as part of the infrastructure itself.
Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Photography by Tom Arban Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Photography by Tom Arban
Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker Benech set the overarching design for the Crosslinx team through DX — Design Excellence: a mobilizing vision, a recognizable design signature, and a kit-of-parts approach built for flow across the entire line.
“In order to implement in-depth architectural thinking on a major urban and architectural project, our team, responsible for the mobilizing design ‘Design Excellence’ vision, together with the technical team, combined our expertise to realize this public transit project” - Renée Daoust, architect and urban designer, founding partner at Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker Benech and DX Lead for the entire project.
The line's design DNA promotes a unified narrative while responding to the particular conditions of each neighbourhood. Natural light becomes a design medium. Movement becomes part of the architecture.
A practical strategy underpins it too: making public transit more legible, appealing, and enjoyable for the people who ride it every day.
The conceptual approach rests on 4 principles: S.I.T.U.
Simplicity — clear geometry and a simple design language, built for timelessness.
Iconography — a recognizable identity through the consistent use of form, materiality, and colour.
Transparency — daylight drawn deep into the stations.
Urbanity — each station adapted to its surrounding context rather than a single solution imposed everywhere.
Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Photography by Tom Arban Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Photography by Tom Arban Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Photography by Tom Arban
At the city scale, the kit-of-parts system threads continuity from infrastructure down to street furniture. Three principal station typologies — pavilion, corner, and embedded — respond to the specific conditions, or genius loci, of each site.
At the station entrance, a pristine glass box, either flat or slanted, forms the system's public face. The transparent volume sits against an opaque technical box that organizes public and service functions.
In addition, the pavilion stations offer the clearest expression of this approach, their slanted glass volumes appearing almost weightless.
“The opaque technical building is encircled by an envelope of luminous, textured precast concrete panels, resonating with Toronto's civic buildings. The precast concrete panels, inspired by the geological layers of the soil, vertically connect the street to the concourse level.” - Rachel Stecker.
The repetition is intentional. A 1.5 metre (4' 11") module sets a rhythm across the system, supporting construction, consistency, maintenance, and future replacement.
Eglinton Crosstown LRT. From plaza to platform. Photo credit: Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker Benech
Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Station Typologies. Photo credit: Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker Benech
Descending into the station, passengers encounter slanted glass ribs that reflect their movement, casting shifting patterns of light and shadow across the textured walls.
Double-height volumes connect the concourse and platform, opening up the space visually and making the route to the train easy to read.
The spaces stay restrained. Simple white surfaces. Public art. Moving bodies.
At platform level, the City Mosaic becomes one of the line's defining visual elements. These mural installations run along the cast-in-place concrete walls, bringing movement and human presence into the platform environment. Colour carries the same logic.
Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Photography by Tom Arban Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Photography by Tom Arban
As the system's signature colour on Toronto's transit map, orange is applied strategically as a wayfinding device, from plaza to platform. Signature canopies with tapered profiles mark the public entrances, while horizontal orange bands recur across the line.
The colour continues through elevator shafts, furniture, and other accent elements, marking important, universally accessible areas and connection points.
This small intervention plays a major role in navigation.
Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Photography by Tom Arban Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Photography by Tom Arban
Public art is integrated directly into the transit journey rather than added as an afterthought.
At three stations, window art displays present the work of emerging local artists at street level. Across six interchange stations, eight works by Canadian and international artists are built into the station architecture.
These pieces mark the interchange points while giving passengers another layer of visual orientation.
The result is infrastructure that carries more than trains. It carries identity.
Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Photography by Tom Arban Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Photography by Tom Arban Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Photography by Tom Arban
The Eglinton Crosstown LRT generates public and civic space, eases congestion, supports greater urban density, and advances the city's eco-friendly targets. Its design framework illustrates what happens when a large infrastructure project has a clear architectural narrative from day one.
That narrative became the shared reference point for a design team of more than 500 architects and engineers, carrying continuity through multiple stages of design and execution.
“As a city-building project, ECLRT represents a unique opportunity to formalize an architectural signature, from civic scale to the finest detail, while respecting the genius loci of Toronto's diverse and constantly evolving neighbourhoods” — Rachel Stecker.
For passengers, the architecture may register differently: a flash of orange at the entrance, daylight falling through glass, the texture of precast concrete under artificial light, a mural stretching alongside the platform as the train pulls in.
The city moves through it.
And the architecture moves with it.
Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Photography by Tom Arban Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Photography by Tom Arban Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Photography by Tom Arban Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Photography by Tom Arban Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Photography by Tom Arban Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Photography by Tom Arban Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Photography by Tom Arban Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Photography by Tom Arban Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Photography by Tom Arban Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Photography by Tom Arban Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Photography by Tom Arban Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Photography by Tom Arban Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Photography by Tom Arban Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Photography by Tom Arban Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Photography by Tom Arban Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Photography by Tom Arban Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Photo credit: Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker Benech Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Photo credit: Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker Benech
