Airport Terminal Design -The future is now

Transcript

Antoinette:We're gonna— I'm gonna talk a little bit. You've been talking about what's happening in the air. I'm talking about what's happening on the ground. Just to say who we are as a practice, Foster and Partners are about 3,000 people, multidisciplinary practice based in London. I'm one of the senior partners there. I've been working in aviation for 20 years. I'm a graduate from Sydney Uni, so not, not a stranger to working in Australia. And we, you know, we've done lots of work in Australia— towers, some infrastructure— but really sort of focusing on our aviation work, which sort of started with Stansted Airport. And the reason why I'm sort of talking today about what we've learned, some lessons learned from the progression in terms of what are your your homes, your bases for your operations over the many years. And, you know, you learn from every, every project. Every one of them is unique. Everyone's unique to place, to the operations, to climate, very much so as well. And the evolution that's come through from programs that's, you know, Heathrow, where we did a lot of work for 7 years on a framework, for example, which was actually doing refurbishment of little bits of building as well as some new build. which led to something like the spaceport for Virgin Galactic in New Mexico, some of the biggest in the world at the time, Hong Kong, Beijing. And we're actually doing some— 2 new ones at the moment, which are— I'll come on to. But just to mention this, because somebody mentioned I'll talk a bit about sustainability, is that gradually as we go through, the demands, the requirements for having the highest ratings in terms of sustainable buildings— and remember, buildings are the huge guzzlers of our energy— is becoming more and more important, and the demands are becoming more and more important. So 2 new ones that we're doing at the moment. There's one I'm running in Poland, which is called CPK. It's the first big greenfield airport in Europe. And it was really driven by rail. So they needed a rail hub in the center of the country, and they want to bring air and rail and actually bus all together as an interchange. And then we're also doing King Salman Airport, which is going to be one of the largest next ones off the tracks, which is quite a new proposition in terms of an approach to airport design. I'll talk a little bit about that. But commonly, I think with all the theme, everything that comes through to us from you as clients, from airport operators and airlines as clients, is a focus around customer experience. So that's always the sort of underlying driving factor no matter what we do. And for that, you know, we are winning many awards, whether it's Skytrax or ACI awards for all of our airports under a number of different categories, which is very important to us. And very important to our clients. When I talk about response to place and climate, we're all talking about that a lot today, obviously, in this forum and in different aspects. And we'll find that a response to climate can also be very sustainable in that sense. So we might pick up on some imagery, but also just how we respond, how you build in a place, what materials you use, and what you do in terms of reducing the heat gain in any of your buildings becomes super important. And, you know, localization, you know, what we pick up on in each place is a character that relates to either the context it's in, the climate it's in, the culture that it's within as well. So always a very, very different response wherever you are. And, you know, one that's very, very consistent in everything that we try and do when we pull all these things together is to make sure that all of these facilities are very, very easy to navigate. So before you end up having signage or complicated technology to sort of take you through these spaces, we use simple devices such as the roof, the floor systems, lines that give you an indication of what the next part of your journey is. And quality and consistency of the offer is really important. Non-aeronautical revenue is super important. That becomes a real driving factor for making these facilities what they are. And we're very proud that in Marseille, which we just finished last July, that the sales— and it's all local products— and Ricard, which is a pastis, has increased its sale by 77% since we actually finished the conversion of their terminal. Technology, obviously, super important. What we're always doing in these projects, and there's a demand from all of our clients, is to make sure that they're future-proof. They may not have all the technology in place from day one about where they want to go with baggage or other systems. But AI is coming into play, I think, really important. The positive aspects of it are really in terms of predictive management of space, predictive management of, you know, check-in areas or boarding areas or go-to-gate, which helps us with our energy consumption in a lot of the buildings because we can dial up or dial down how much we need to condition space and therefore reduce the energy demand of these facilities. And other projects that we have which you might say is sort of more innovative in terms of, you know, Virgin Hyperloop— we've done some studies for them about moving cargo around. Vertiports, you know, we heard about vertiports today. Many of the airports that are talking to us have asked us to include within the master plan a strategy for the inclusion of vertiports. This is one in Dubai that's a specific one that's to connect air and also rail transportation to different locations within the city. And coming on to sort of, you know, what I was saying, like the, some of the future ideas around airports. This is a very interesting, unique proposition. You can see a sort of a rectangular form, which is all of the gates wrapping around this This airport, and with four sub-small terminals within it, and then a souk within that. And what everybody's working through, and again technology plays a very big part of that, is to blur the edges between what is land side and air side. And so everybody's working very hard to use all the biometrics and all the other systems that you can to bring not you know passengers who aren't the traveling public as well. Coming into this one space. So it's a true integrated airport city concept. And within that, a very different language. Again, climate, very hot. We're looking at not sort of a glassy terminal. We're looking at things that are very, very solid. We're looking at the integration of landscape. We're looking even at the facade and the interface of the building itself, providing some shading to the aircraft as well to provide some cooling, again, to reduce all of the energy demands. And whenever— whatever we do, also, I think really, really important is accessibility, equitable space, making sure that everybody has access, everybody of every ability has got access, and a good positive experience. Sustainability, you know, obviously I'll talk about some case studies now as I go through, but we still have a very human-centric approach to these spaces. So I remember, I think it was Schiphol we were talking to a few years back, and what I really liked about their brief was they said, we want it to be visible. We don't just want a label on the wall to say we've got all the certification. We want our customers to come in and feel that it's a very sustainable sort of environment. And sense of place becomes very important. This is Phnom Penh, and it's not just a visual. We're actually concluding that at the moment. It's in construction. We're carrying through the themes, the how you make it right through to conclusion, to a reality that speaks to local place and local culture. Other aspects of sustainability. This is Queen Alia Airport. Again, a place that needed— wanted to be carbon neutral. It was the first ACA accredited in the Middle East carbon neutral airport. With very, very heavy construction of the mass of the building to, again, reduce the heat load. I chair the IATA Airport Design Reference Manual subgroup on sustainability since 2019. I got that because I went to a review meeting and I said, you don't have a sustainability chapter. So they said, great, can you write one? And what I do is I bring together consultants, many consultants, and we have some airlines, and we've had some airports as well involved in that process. We've just started the next chapter, Chapter 13, and these are all the companies that are involved in that. And we looked at the Sustainable Development Goals, the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and we strategized it under these 7 chapters. And just a shout out to any of you who want to get involved because it is very— it's still very Europe-centric, a bit Middle East, but not enough that's coming to the Southern Hemisphere. So we'd love some of you to get involved, maybe as reviewers or give us some case studies that we can put into the manual. But when we talk about sustainability, it's not just about carbon, it's about all these other aspects. In terms of whether it's environment and health or resiliency. And we always say, if you can't measure something, then you can't report on it. And then you can't actually say how you're going to sort of shift the dial. So that becomes an important chapter as well. And just some of the— just to talk a bit about specifically some of the strategies in our airports in terms of sustainability, Kuwait. you know, water, transportation, using PVs all come into play. But then just in terms of the form of the building, also this idea that we've also taken into Riyadh about shading the aircraft themselves. Phenom Penh has got a number of different strategies in terms of driving towards being a net-zero terminal in terms of, you know, solar production as well as— and reducing the embodied carbon. Marseille, I think, is a very interesting one. This is one we just finished last July. And actually, when they came to us, and it's just got the prize for the most beautiful airport in the world, but it was a French competition saying so. So, but we'll take it. We're happy with that. That's fine. But in France, there's HQE, is the the regulation in terms of getting your rating, your good rating. And we did lots of different things in terms of how to optimize this. But one of the sort of first things we did, and the left-hand diagram, this is just a plan of what they had identified as all the areas that needed to be renewed and renovated as part of their plan. And what we did was actually look at and say, and it was all about phasing. It was all about smart phasing and said, because the first rule of sustainability is to build less, so can we repurpose more? And actually the strategy we came up with was just the blue bit, which is the middle bit, was the new piece, and all the rest was refurbishment of existing. And it was all built, all the blue bit was actually built over an active baggage hall. So no mean feat and no mean challenge. I won't show the film, but the principles have been to mimic the new and the existing architecture. So in fact, there's a 1960s facade and building on the land side, and then Richard Rogers and Partners had done an extension on the air side. And we actually copied the facades of both, so it all feels that it sort of knits together. So there wasn't a sort of let's shout louder than everybody else architecture. It was absolutely about integrating the experience. 'Cause at the end of the day, the passenger continuity and their experiences, so what happens on the floor, what happens with the ceilings, what happens with the materials as you run through. And we had this sort of challenge back then about how we measure carbon, but actually there was no data really available to us and people weren't capturing the data of this building typology. So we did a first measure of where we were with the beginning of the design and we just said, okay, let's give ourselves a target of 30%. 30% reduction in terms of its carbon. And we have a tool we draw, it's called BIM. This is how we now draw as architects and engineers. And we kept with a library that exists of the values of every material, we kept playing with it and testing it and changing and swapping out materials, optimizing the structure, reducing the amount of steel until we got down to that 30% target. Just going through just other aspects, I think one thing that's really important is also how you build things. And you can be very efficient if you make very modular buildings. Off-site manufacturing can make things much smarter, cleaner, leaner to build and install. So these are just a few examples of where all of these projects have had a high component of what we what we call offsite manufacturing and design for manufacture as well. And the componentry and the geometry of everything all worked through so it's easy to assemble, but also easy to extend over time. And sort of lastly, this is CPK, the one in Poland, which, you know, the brief there was that they were going to start at 40 million passengers and go up to 100. So again, having a modular solution, something that could be easy to extend over time, was absolutely critical. And so you can see these ideas of these ribs running through, which are all repeatable, so you can keep adding. And this is actually one of the intermediate phases shown here in this image. But it is, as I say, it's an airport. It's also a railway station. And we like this image the most because it shows there's actually 14 tracks. It's a big, big railway station that connects in with the air. And that all helps also with the sustainability story in Europe. So having integrated hubs gives people choices about the transportation they're going to take, and the bus station as well. And one of the ideas that to create the same value of experience for all of these, you can see the architecture is the same for all of these spaces in terms of experience. And it has a very high demand in terms of where they want to get in terms of their sustainability rating. And they've done some very smart things. We can't take credit for that because it's a site-wide strategy for having this, what's called an ambient loop. So they have centralized plant which delivers energy around the whole campus, and so you're sharing in peaks and troughs where energy is being delivered, which is sort of really important. And you'd sort of think that you don't have an issue with water in Central Europe, but there's actually been a drought in Poland. So yes, water conservation becomes important. And from our perspective, in terms of the architecture in the building, we've been looking at, you know, we go into a lot of details about the materiality. We have what we call lean design principles. So we keep engineering and engineering down, which means looking at the span, looking at the size of a column, looking at the, you know, the heights of a space. And in fact, when we had— when we received the master plan, the first thing we did was optimize that master plan, and we saved 20% of area. So we tightened everything up to absolutely what it had to be, no extra space whatsoever. And building less, less carbon, but also less cost, which is always of interest to all of the investors as well. I've mentioned, you know, that human scale is really important, that introducing biophilia, which gives that sense of a quality sustainable environment, and smart systems embedded within the project in terms of, as I say, managing flows, managing people through the space, and the maintenance of space as well becomes really critical. So if you've got smart AI systems, you can reduce your costs of maintenance as well and have the focus where it needs to be. And all of that, when we— and just in terms of technology, when we draw, we draw in a sort of a total system. This is called a BIM model. So all of our consultants, and we've got 515 people working to deliver this project, for example, everything is drawn in 3 dimensions so that we avoid any surprises when you come to construct this on site. And behind all of this wonderful passenger experience is, as you know, the complexity of all the things you know about in terms of baggage systems, mechanical, electrical, that make it work. So I think that's the end of me, and I think I've saved some time for you, Marco, because I'm 40 seconds on time, if that's okay. So thank you, everybody. Thank you.

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