The essential material of architecture is light, without it there would be no “volumes under the sun” or interior spaces. This project is built with simple, repetitive, and prefabricated materials: foundation, pillars, beams, floors, and facades…, but they are conceived and designed immersed in a luminous environment. The interior of the passenger terminal becomes a luminous experience, a way of confining light, in a box capable of modeling, directing, and modulating sunlight.
The project for this newly built Private Terminal proposes a clear and decisive geometry defined by a single volume (120 x 47 meters) in which the exterior metallic materiality that surrounds the building unifies its various functions and structures.
This skin, which in some areas is micro-perforated to allow natural light to enter the interior, gives the project a unitary industrial appearance, whilst being dynamic and variable changing according to time and sunlight.
The new Multi-Modal Terminal at O’Hare International Airport connects the airport’s ground transportation options in one spot. Connected to the airline terminals by a 1-1/2 mile extension of the Airport Transit System (ATS), or people mover, it is a welcoming and convenient gateway to Chicago for arriving visitors.
Project: Multi-Modal Terminal O’Hare International Airport
Location: Chicago, Illinois
Photography: Hall+Merrick
Cost: $841 million (including ATS extension)
Project Team: City of Chicago, Department of Aviation, Owner Ross Barney Architects, Design Architect TranSystems, Architect of Record, Transportation Engineer, Lead Consultant Delta Engineering, Mechanical Plumping, Fire Protection Engineer Singh & Associates, Electrical Engineer Walker Parking, Parking Layout Austin Power Partners, Construction Manager at Risk
Zaha Hadid Architects (UK) working with Esplan (Estonia) have been have been awarded first place in the design competition for the new terminal of the Rail Baltic railway at Ülemiste, Tallinn.
Rail Baltic is a planned 870 km electrified railway from Tallinn in Estonia to the Lithuanian-Polish border. The terminal will be the starting point of the Rail Baltic line connecting Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius with the European high-speed rail network.
The Ülemiste terminal is designed as a connecting public bridge used by the local community as well as multi-modal transport hub for commuters, national and international rail passengers in addition to air travelers using the adjacent Tallinn airport.
The West Terminal 2 passenger ferry terminal is situated in Helsinki’s West Harbour on a narrow plot of reclaimed land at the southern tip of the new Jätkäsaari neighbourhood, a former freight port area just outside the city centre.
The new terminal was built to meet the needs of the growing ferry traffic on the Helsinki-Tallinn route. The goal was to enable faster embarkation and disembarkation of passengers and reduce the turnaround times of ferries in port to just one hour. The terminal will serve the majority of the 6-7 million passengers travelling between Helsinki and Tallinn via West Harbour each year.
Beijing Daxing International Airport is a new airport in the Daxing district 46km south of the city centre (20 minutes by express train).
Developed to alleviate congestion at the capital’s existing airport, Beijing Daxing will be a major transport hub for the region with the world’s fastest growing demand for international travel and is fully integrated within the country’s expanding transport network.
Initially serving 45 million passengers per year, Beijing Daxing will accommodate 72 million travellers by 2025 and is planned for further expansion to serve up to 100 million passengers and 4 million tonnes of cargo annually.
The new €37.5m (£27.6m) Transfer Terminal at Arnhem Central Station in the Netherlands has now completed.
The station is the result of an ambitious 20-year project – masterplanned by UNStudio – to redevelop the wider station area; the largest post-war development in Arnhem. Backed by the Dutch government, this transfer hub rewrites the rulebook on train stations and is the most complex of its type in Europe. The station will become the new ‘front door’ of the city, embracing the spirit of travel, and is expected to establish Arnhem as an important node between Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. The new terminal houses commercial areas, and a conference centre and provides links to the nearby office plaza, city centre, underground parking garage and the Park Sonsbeek. The area around the station will become a place in of itself, with 160,000m2 of offices, shops and a cinema complex.
The first part of the long-awaited revitalization of the Prague riverfront area called Náplavka is coming to completion, making it one of the most attractive public embankments in Europe.
In autumn 2019, nineteen vaults on the Rašín and Hořejší Embankments will be put into use. Six will feature the biggest elliptical pivoting windows in the world, connecting the inner spaces with the riverfront area in a unique way, through the diagonal rotation of the five-meter wide glazed “lenses”. The other spaces will have distinct steel sculptural entrances.
Following the completion of cable car designs for the cities of Gothenburg and Amsterdam, UNStudio was recently selected as the winner in the competition for the first ever cross border cable car, which will carry passengers across the Amur River to connect Russia and China.
Following a vision round involving 12 practices in the invited competition managed by Strelka KB, UNStudio and Coop Himmelb(l)au were selected to submit design proposals for the Blagoveshchensk Terminal Station in Russia for the second phase. Strelka KB were also responsible for the economic and functional model of the Cable Car Terminal.
The basis for the interior solution was the fact that during the construction of the new airport, at the construction site, a mound with Sarmatian burials was discovered and, in the mound, there lay treasure with gold ornaments.