Great Mall/Main Station Profile

Great Mall Parkway at South Main Street in Milpitas

• Large shelters designed to protect passengers from heat, rain and wind, also include an information kiosk, pay phone, ticket vending machine and seating, including both leaning rails and benches. 
  
  
• Ample landscaping including trees and shrubs.  The edges of the planter boxes also provide additional seating.
  
  
• Distinctively designed lighting that ensures that stations are well lit at nighttime.
  
  
• Digital message boards signs that indicate the time and provide information on light rail service.
  
  
• A unique color scheme for the station furniture and shelters selected by the City of Milpitas.
  
  
• Safety features include railing along platform edges adjacent to the street and outside of passenger boarding areas along the track, as well as a tactile warning band along the platform edge.

Paving by Adam Zawadzki

Based on research about the Milpitas community, this paving project for the Great Mall/Main Transit Center presents themes of transportation and community.  Design focuses on transportation by foot and by wheels.  To symbolize travel by foot and a variety of commutes, selected individuals took a choreographed walk through the wet concrete in the transit centers bus island.  The shoe imprints exemplify different shoe styles, symbolizing the diverse individuals within the community.  In the plaza adjacent to the bus island, wheel shapes in colored concrete are visible to passengers as they travel to and from the Great Mall/Main Light Rail Station above the plaza. 

Safety Fence Art Panels 
by John Okulick

The panels are a blend of broadband shapes and narrow wire that weave together.  The weave, like the weave of a basket, refers to the harvest and the Valley's agricultural past, and also suggests the pattern of a circuit board or computer chip that has become the new harvest.  The winding lines, like winding country roads, have been replaced with a network of grids with dots, like stops on the transit system.  The dots also refer to seeds, a metaphor for growth.

Sculptural seating
by Ries Niemi

The artist has created seating to replace the standard benches in the Great Mall/Main Transit Center.  The shapes of the wire-frame metal benches refer to the Ford Motor Plant that once occupied the Great Mall site.  One is shaped like a camshaft, the other like a hubcap.

Shelter canopy glass
by Deborah Mersky

These glass panels provides a vivid organic patterned skylight.  The large-scale imagery hangs above the passengers like an unfolding constellation.  The imagery depicts an array of fruit and flowers commonly found in local household gardens.  The specific examples were chosen to represent the four corners of the world as well as native California plants.  Strings of seeds and knotted thread are also visible.  The uniform color of the carved glass and its low contrast background make the images very visible, but subtle.

VTA Routes 33, 46, 47, 59, 66, 70, 71, 77, 104, 140, 180, 321, and AC Transit Route 217. 

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