Aéroports de Paris, winner of design competition for New Beijing Terminal, fine tunes new airport design

Design of the terminal 1 of the new Beijing Airport © ADPI & Zaha Hadid Architects

Design of the terminal 1 of the new Beijing Airport © ADPI & Zaha Hadid Architects

In September 2014, ADP Ingénierie (ADPI), a wholly-owned Aéroports de Paris subsidiary, was officially declared winner of the international competition organized by Beijing New Airport Construction Headquarters (BNAH) for the design of Terminal 1 at Beijing’s New Daxing Airport.

Located at Daxing, 60 km south of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, the new Beijing International Airport will eventually have seven runways and over 100 million passengers passing through it per year, making it one of the largest airports in the world. With 7.5 million square feet surface area and three mile-long façade, the future Beijing Airport’s Terminal 1 on opening – scheduled for late 2018 – will have an annual capacity of 45 million passengers that can be expanded to 72 million passengers.

As the competition winner, ADP Ingénierie has fine tuned the design supported by Zaha Hadid Consortium as part of a mixed team managed by BNAH.

Based on its own integrated planning, architecture and engineering resources, ADP Ingénierie offers a sophisticated concept, building on its longstanding experience as an airport operator and lessons learned from the iconic project to develop Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport as well as some of the largest airports in the world.

Underpinning ADP Ingénierie’s concept is the decision to stack the international and domestic levels vertically instead of spreading them out horizontally. This innovation led to designing a compact terminal with a single passenger handling centre serving radial boarding piers.

The centralized single-terminal concept provides numerous benefits: efficient and economical to operate, enhanced passenger experience from the many services provided including shopping areas and inter-modal ground transport. Given the terminal’s compact design, the distance between the terminal centre and the farthest boarding gate is around 650 yards, less than Asian and European terminals with similar capacity. Passengers can easily find their way within the open interior layout of the terminal, gravitating naturally to the grand skylight central area where shops and services are located, and then walking straight ahead to their gate.

Inspired by Chinese architectural traditions and symbols reshaped in a contemporary style, the design is modern and blends naturally into its surroundings. The new airport was a unique chance for ADP Ingénierie to underpin the design approach by sustainability. The goal was to create an iconic airport reflecting unprecedented levels of environmental management and sustainability to bolster the airport’s leading low carbon status. Beijing New Airport will aspire to be Asia’s leading green hub of choice.