PROJECT REPORT: TRANSPORT FACILITIES & PUBLIC REALM
The existing airport in Beijing hosted over 100 million travellers last year, believed to only be surpassed globally by Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Georgia, US. Because of air traffic and congestion in the skies, however, there was only so much throughput available in the existing airport, “so it made sense to start from scratch.” While these embers burned among the Chinese air transport authorities, ZHA was already busy working on other developments in the centre of Beijing. The Government was reportedly impressed, and asked the practice if it would participate in the design shortlist for a new Beijing airport. With part of Ceccato’s personal remit being to expand ZHA into other sectors it hadn’t yet established itself in, he says the practice pulled out all the stops to win the project, and gain a foothold in the aviation space.
The team saw it not just as a chance to contribute to a “new national gateway,” he says, and thus attain a high profile in the sector, they also had a strong affinity with the project due to the practice’s highly international nature, and therefore familiarity for regular global air travel, meaning they knew the issues to resolve for passengers. “Air travel is a unifying and democratising experience, one that all at ZHA have a connection to,” says the architect. “Unless you’re using a private jet, everyone who travels in this manner goes through the airport together – and we wanted to change this experience for the better.”
Zaha herself was intimately involved for the same reasons, he tells me: “She really cared about this project – when we entered the competition, she personally came to Beijing and presented it herself, with all its technicalities and functionality. It really is one of her legacy works.”
The client was impressed with her efforts, and with a masterplan from Netherlands Airport Consultants (NACO) already commissioned the previous year before, the practice was asked to merge with another competitor, French team ADPI, and produce a full design submission. With ZHA leading the architectural design integrating ADPI’s planning principles, the partnership would work alongside the Chinese Local Design Institutes (BIAD and CACC) to realise the project’s aims. ZHA, from this point on, was involved at different stages of the design process, working on the interior fit out as
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well as the exterior, retail planning and other facets of the project, through a series of different agreements.
Ceccato believes this deep partnership, with the architects being involved essentially from the ground up, helped to create a “truly unified” vision with what he says was a “very generous and visionary” client.
A clean slate
The client had acquired a large, empty greenfield site in Daxing District, south of Beijing, for the project, providing a “clean slate,” says the architect. Unlike at Beijing’s existing main airport – and most urban infrastructure developments – they were not overly restricted by space, though it remained a goal for the project design to remain compact for ease of passenger navigation and efficient aircraft operations. As a result of the compact nature of the terminal, instead of designing something long and thin to fit alongside the necessarily lengthy strip of land needed for runways, here the team could design a system of branching runways from a central hub of taxiways. This was the pragmatic key to forming the splayed “hand”-like shape of the building, which Ceccato prefers to ‘starfish,’ – having five wide- spaced ‘fingers.’ “We came upon this hand shape very intentionally,” says Ceccato. “The way you start looking at the morphology of a terminal is dominated by runway spacing; the greater surface area you have between the ‘fingers,’ the more aircraft you can park.” With more aircraft able to park relatively close to the centre of the terminal without excessively long piers, passenger walking time across the building is minimal. This eliminates the need for automated trains to each gate, an idea the client was particularly keen on.
Such transport is expensive to build, to maintain, and, “most importantly,” says Ceccato, “it becomes the weakest link in the chain.” And, past removing the need for such transports, the hand shape enabled the team to improve the airport experience in the most appreciated way possible – by increasing the speed of user navigation.
Stacked functions
In order to further increase the speed of navigation, it was vital that the airport’s many functions be arranged carefully.
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“Zaha really cared about this project –- when we entered the competition, she personally came to Beijing and presented it herself, it really is one of her legacy works”
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