SPECIAL REPORT: SUSTAINABILITY Lateral thinking
Chicago O’Hare’s Modernization Program has become a role model of sustainable design, writes Oliver Clark.
I
n 2001 senators from the US transport committee hastily gathered at Chicago’s Dirksen Federal Courthouse for a crisis meeting with city and state officials – the topic under discussion – the future of Chicago O’Hare International Airport. O’Hare was ranked the world’s second busiest airport, processing
67 million passengers that year and the main base for United and American Airlines, but it was also ranked the USA’s most congested hub with perennial delays leading to disruption across the globe. The committee called for action and the City of Chicago’s answer was a
modernisation project that would establish O’Hare as a shining example of sustainable practices. With the airport hemmed in on all sides by residential developments and
Chicago Mayor Richard Daley publicly pledging that no taxes would be levied for improvements – an extensive expansion plan was out of the question.
“At the time O’Hare’s runways all intersected so we had an airport that
worked well in the propeller age when wind strength and direction were important, but when we entered the jet age planes became less dependent on such factors,” explains Andolino. “We also had to streamline the whole system in order to reduce delays
associated with aircraft queuing on the runway,” she adds. Nevertheless, bringing OMP to completion presented a significant
logistical, financial and environmental challenge leading the City of Chicago to issue its staff and contractors with a set of guidelines to guide their work – the award winning Sustainable Design Manual (SDM). Issued in 2003, SDM applied the smart building principles
developed by the US Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) to keep the OMP as efficient and environmentally friendly as possible.
The City of Chicago not only demanded that these solutions be developed as quickly as possible, but they also made it imperative that the work be done in a manner that maximised the sustainability of the airport and the environment
The answer was to make maximum use of existing land and assets and
the $6.6 billion O’Hare Modernization Program (OMP) – a bold two-phase engineering project based around the construction of one new runway, the relocation of three runways and extending two existing runways. Other key projects include the construction of two new air traffic control
towers and a new western terminal. “O’Hare, unlike say Dallas/Fort Worth, doesn’t have lots of land so we had
to modernise what we already had, while at the same time ensuring we look for the best use of our facilities for our customers, whether cargo or passenger,” says Rosemarie Andolino, who has headed the OMP since 2003. To achieve a desired 79% capacity increase in O’Hare’s operations, the
project would reconfigure the gateway’s seven intersecting runways into a more efficient set of six parallel runways running east-west and two additional runways running north east to south east. This set up would not only remove a thorn in Chicago O’Hare’s side; the
delays associated with poor weather interrupting flights, but also mean the airport would only require limited expansion.
30 AIRPORT WORLD/AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 2010 Divided into eight categories, including sustainable site management,
water efficiency and co-ordination of resources, the SDM would be binding on all contractors and all projects and to get a sense of its influence you need go no further than one of the lead consultants on master planning for the OMP – Ricondo and Associates. “The City of Chicago not only demanded that these solutions be
developed as quickly as possible, but they also made it imperative that the work be done in a manner that maximised the sustainability of the airport and the environment,” says Shawn Kinder, vice president of OMP lead planner, Ricondo & Associates. “To give you an example, we had preliminary construction
phasing plans developed before we had an approved Airport Layout Plan. We were working with design teams early in the process to develop earthwork plans that minimised the environmental impacts of construction well before the contractors were in the field,” Kinder adds. Thanks to the SDM and its replacement, the Sustainable Airport Manual (SAM) and the application of LEED principles, Chicago’s
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