Abu Dhabi International Airport terminal
LUXEXPO EXHIBITION CENTRE AND KIRCHBERG STATION
Luxembourg, 2010
Located on the most important axis of Luxembourg, the site of the Luxexpo Exhibition Centre and Kirchberg Station becomes a strategic infrastructural node where international, regional and local traffic merges. The new urban pole that is created at the site is articulated by three main elements: the new Kirchberg Station, the intermodal exchange and the reformulated Exhibition Centre. The aim of the design is to create a unified urban structure in which diverse infrastructural and public elements merge together to form one building. The Kirchberg Station is designed to be a terminal station which provides the possibility for a future extension of the train tracks towards the city centre, while the exhibition centre Luxexpo becomes a communicative hub promoting exhibits in an innovative and high-quality environment.
MASTERPLAN STATION AREA
Gijon, Spain, 2005
Weaving together the disjointed parts of the city the masterplan creates cross connections and cross views between different neighbourhoods and between the station and the beach, while establishing a primarily pedestrian platform for new mixed-use developments, including housing, retail, office and leisure functions. The roof of the station is designed as a raised continuation of the park, a public space that is accessible from both sides of the rails. The pedestrian areas increase towards the entrance hall as local meeting points on the top of the station provide panoramic views across the plaza towards the city and the beach. The roof of the hall becomes a part of the landscape, providing local connections across the global connection axis and repairing the fracture to the city fabric created by the existing railway lines.
NEW STREET STATION
Birmingham, England, 2008
The two main considerations in the design for the New Street Station are the station as a part of the urban fabric and as a node of the travelling network. The atrium plays an important role in the station’s identity. At the heart of the station a direct connection is introduced, allowing the users to use the retail facilities while waiting for their departure. The escalators organize the concourse while the bridge at the centre of the atrium links different points of the retail level. The large structure of the roof mirrors the geometry of the bridge below, allowing for a column free space. The atrium establishes a further level of familiarity with the external façade by using the same materials. The façade material becomes glass where transparency is desirable, integrates lighting where necessary and transforms into highly glossy metal, with the reflection offering new surprising views.
MASTERPLAN & TRAIN STATION
Bologna, Italy, 2007
The extension for the Central Station of Bologna has the multi-folded role being a key node on the transport network as well as an important block in the urban fabric bridging the historical division of the city. After a diagnosis of the potentials and strengths of the city the design develops an especially tailored programme for each of the different user groups, creating a neighbourhood with new streets, boulevards, squares and city functions which benefit the transport user and local residents alike. The luminous heart of the station with the intricate structure provides a distinct and unique identity, offering a different experience on each visit and celebrating the act of traveling. A delicate steel structure is installed 20 metres above the tracks, functioning as a roof which covers – and thereby combines – all areas of the station.
UNStudio + EE&K: los angeles union station master plan
Architecture: Los Angeles Union Station Master Plan by UNStudio + EE&K: “..a rail terminal and urban design proposal for downtown los angeles, california. transforming the current train station into a multi-modal transit hub for trains, subways, buses, taxis, cars, bikes, the venue will host mixed-use development as well as outdoor public spaces. presenting a design which offers a range of possibilities for the city, the vision integrates green areas into the transportation experience of transient visitors while creating much needed amenities for local residents..” Forward-looking, and thinking, proposal.
King Abdulalziz International Airport, JeddahRailway station
Diller Scofidio + Renfro Want To Turn Penn Station Into A Futuristic “City Within A City”
. MAD Architects unveils snowflake-shaped terminal for Harbin Taiping Airport
A snowflake-inspired design for the third terminal of Harbin Taiping International Airport in China’s northeastern Heilongjiang province has been unveiled by Ma Yansong’s MAD Architects.
MAD Architects’ design echoes the characteristics of Harbin’s geography and climate, such as the surrounding northern plains and the region’s snow and ice. The firm says the design “creates an architectural poetry that settles into its locale, while simultaneously expressing itself as a surreal, interstellar space of future air travel”.
The 3,300ha terminal will contain departure gates in each of its five fingers, as well as ancillary airport facilities, such as ground transportation hubs, hotel, retail, and parking lots, that will serve the rest of the airport.
A ground transportation centre will bring together high-speed rail, municipal subway lines, airport buses and other urban transport modes.
Harbin Taiping airport is located at the core of northeast Asia’s hinterland and is one of the largest transport hubs in the region, serving 6 million passengers each year.
MAD says by 2030 Harbin Taiping International Airport will cater to 43m passengers and 320,000 outgoing flights a year.
Beijing Daxing International Airport by ADP Ingénierie and Zaha Hadid Architects (1)
A little over a decade after Beijing Capital Airport constructed a new terminal by Foster + Partners to accommodate an additional 50 million passengers a year, the capital city is unveiling a new airport just 30 miles to the south. The 7.5 million-square-foot Beijing Daxing International Airport, designed by the team of ADP Ingénierie (ADPi), Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA), and the Beijing Institute of Architecture and Design (BIAD), will include four runways (compared to three at the Capital) and serve 45 million passengers yearly when it opens this fall; by 2025, that capacity is expected to reach an annual 72 million. Built on a greenfield site in a rural area in Hebei province, the starfish-shaped terminal, with its glowing standing-seam aluminum roof and cluster of bulbous skylights, appears as an alien spacecraft—or, for some Chinese, as the auspicious mythological phoenix—when viewed from above.
The new airport is a driving force of an economic-development plan to integrate Beijing with the surrounding regions of Hebei and Tianjin, creating a megalopolis that will alleviate congestion and pollution in the capital. Daxing is seen as a crucial multimodal transportation hub, eventually connecting a network of high-speed rail and improved intercity railways and hundreds of upgraded expressways throughout the three regions, which already have 130 million people.
The steel structure has a highly efficient six-pier radial form that minimizes distances between check-ins and gates. By vertically stacking the international and domestic levels around a central multilevel retail atrium, the layout facilitates direct routes for passengers, especially for those with connecting flights (all 150 aircraft bays are no farther than a third of a mile from the central area). “With the star-shaped form, and moving walkways along each spoke, we can achieve minimum connection times,” says Cristiano Ceccato, who leads ZHA’s aviation projects. “If I only have 30 minutes to get on my connecting flight, I know I can make it, because the airport supports me in that way.”
Critical to the terminal’s design was to foster smart technology for ubiquitous function. Catering to China’s exceptionally tech-savvy population, Daxing will feature a completely automated departures mezzanine dedicated to high-frequency domestic travelers, with self-check-in and self-tagging baggage systems that will move passengers expeditiously to security using only their smartphones. “A lot of airports have separate VIP fast tracks, but those amount to small areas within the departure level. This is different,” says Ceccato. “The Chinese have a completely new level of confidence in this technological revolution and have literally poured it into concrete as a separate floor.” At the airport’s north pier, departing passengers can enter the express mezzanine, or go through the full-service check-in at the level above, where international travelers pass along a bridge across the core that also leads to immigration; domestic travelers are led down to the retail floor to get to the air side. Throughout the interior, fluid, sweeping forms are meant to evoke rolling landscapes or lines of calligraphy.
The terminal’s flexible design is made possible by eight graceful parabolic megacolumns that curve down from the vaulted-dome ceiling to the ground, supporting the central atrium and the long-spanned roof, and allowing for a vast, open floor plate. These curved structural masts, each topped by a convex 350-foot-diameter skylight, funnel natural light into different areas of the terminal, where retail pods throughout the international and domestic shopping levels can be easily reconfigured. “Over time, shopping requirements and behaviors will change, and, when they do, you will never actually need to rip out the guts,” says Ceccato. “The columns will be unaffected by this.”
Daxing is an exemplar of how airports are evolving into more complex nodes of interconnectivity—of people, machines, information, transportation, and cities. The project has already catalyzed nearby urban development; as Ceccato suggests, people could take the soon-to-be-completed high-speed rail to Daxing and then the bus to work nearby without ever setting foot in the terminal.
