Designing The Airports Of The Future

Transcript

Antoinette Erickson Nassopoulos:Foster+Partners are a global practice. We're about 1,500 people based in London. And we do everything, we might say, from master plans to door handles is our sort of motto. Apart from airports are us as well. And just the way we work is we're an integrated practice. So we're not just architects. We have engineers, analysts, psychologists even now we've employed, some economists, industrial designers, interior designers, model makers, filmmakers. So we're sort of a one-stop shop in terms of what we produce. And that's quite important for us in terms of how we contribute to the projects that we develop. So we've got offices all over the world. Lots of projects all around the world too, about 300 projects on the go at one time. And our work is quite diverse. And I think this is just important to mention because when it comes to airports, they're one of the most complex building types that exist. They've got retail in them. They've got offices in them. It's public space as well. There's operational considerations. So in the work that we've done, so from— we're doing Apple's headquarters, for example, in Cupertino. We're doing over 100 Apple stores stores around the world. We just opened one in Dubai, if you ever get to go and see that. It's quite impressive. One in Regent Street in London. But some iconic buildings that you might recognize in these images as well. We win a lot of prizes. Norman Foster, some of you might have heard of, is our chairman and our leader in terms of our design vision. And very passionate he is also about flying. So aviation airport design is something that we focused on. These are just some of the airports that we've completed around the world. It started off— our first airport was in Stansted back in the '80s, through to Hong Kong, Beijing. So some of the largest ones, through to some more modest piece of work. We spent about 7 years working for BAA at Heathrow doing alternates and strategic planning. So quite a broad range, quite, quite different scale, different types, different cultures. And in that evolution— so coming on to the sort of future of airports— that we find that, you know, in every project we do, we're learning from each of those projects, and that moves us forward in terms of trying to determine what is the right approach, what's the way to do things. And the more recent projects there up on the list, we've got 3 under construction at the moment: Panama, Kuwait, Mexico City. I'll talk about Mexico City a little bit more. And even to one that we just recently completed for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey for Governor Cuomo, which was a revisioning of JFK, for example. So some, you know, very interesting issues when you start to look at existing airports that are site-constrained. How do you, you know, maintain that operation, maintain the growth that they need within some very, very tight constraints. So again, quite broad. So, but each one of these projects is very, very different, and they're different because of the culture, the climate, the place. The architecture is different, the responses are different, and the brief is different depending on what the stakeholders of each airport want and need in terms of their operations, how they work, and what their expectations are. So coming on to sort of some of just Trying to talk about future of airports in 10 minutes is quite a challenge. So I'm just going to hit on a few key points. And one of the very, very key points is about really flexibility or green airports and how we actually deal with change. Because I think one thing that we've learned from all of the projects that we've done is that change is a constant. You're all changing, you know, technology, processes. And so when it came to Mexico City Airport— and this is now under construction, as I mentioned— we took that on board from the start. Because one thing that you might not understand about our process is that when we're— when we tender for an airport project, often there's a competition, a competitive bid. That's probably about 7 years or sometimes longer. I think the fastest one we've done was Beijing, which was in under 5 years from the moment we won the competition to the day it opened. So with that sort of period of time, the key issue for all of you is the decision-making about how you want to operate that. So what we find is that we have to make very early decisions because the contractors are asking for that, but you haven't decided where you want to be with your technology. And one thing that's changing very rapidly at the moment is technology. So, you know, how you want to operate again is key. This project in Mexico City is very interesting. It's actually got 3 parts to it because the city again has grown. It's 22 million people in that city. The airport is now completely constrained by the growth around it. And so they found a new site. It's taken many years of consultation, just as it has done here around Badgery's Creek. Creek. And they found the last bit of Texcoco Lake in Mexico City to build a new airport. So it becomes 3 projects. It becomes a project where we're regenerating the existing airport sites. We're building a new airport. But then the infrastructure, all of the connectivity, railroads that connect to that new airport, become super, super key. Just to say, it takes a lot of people to make projects like this. So this is the complete team that's involved in that. We're the master architects with a local firm called Fernando Romero. For us, it's very important, and it's common that we do around the world, we'll always collaborate with local partners. And we think that's very important for the legacy of projects as well, as you need to sort of constantly maintain things. And these sorts of projects, this is the number of stakeholders, 170 stakeholders involved in Mexico City. There's 5 home carriers there, so although Aeroméxico are prevalent and have grandfather rights in terms of what their needs and desires are, and they have a relationship with Delta, so there's a lot of influence there. There are still a lot of other home carriers who all have a view, and when we— you know, we've been meeting with them over the last few years, and they're still making decisions on how they want to run their check-in processes or how they want to board their aircraft, all of the things that affect us, but we have to get some some things in place. It's already changing so that we started it on a master plan that said it was going to be about 65 million passengers. And as the project keeps going on and they keep reviewing the forecasts and the growths come up, it's another 20% and another 20%. So we're already getting towards 70 in the first phase. And the total build-out is estimated to be 125, but could actually probably increase. And just to give you an idea of the size and scale of that over Sydney, it's quite shocking. I know the runways look very long there, but Mexico City's 2,200 meters, so it's high altitude, so you need longer runways. But just to give you a sort of sense of the vision. So the vision, again, when you're talking about airports nowadays, you know, there was a moment when there was a sort of vision about making international architecture. something that was quite neutral, very modern for airports. But everything we've done has always been about place, since— probably since Hong Kong. So Beijing's an example where we try and sort of refer to the local architecture and culture. And Mexico, you know, as you may have traveled there, has got a lot of monumental architecture. And so the idea was to sort of respect that monumentalism as well, but also the change of the, you know, the business. This airport is— It's a new airport. It's very high on domestic travel. But people spend— even though it's domestic, people are spending a lot of time dwelling there. People get there very early. It's family groups. They've actually banned the mariachi bands from both departures and arrivals, because there were mariachi wars. So retail, very, very key in terms of the space. But what we did then, coming back to this thing about flexibility, and allowing for change is that you see a huge space frame structure. And this structure, the span of it is, if you can understand what that is, 150 meters apart. And so this whole floating roof made out of a big space frame, and we use space frames, we did that at Beijing, 'cause they're very fast to build, very quick to build, with no services in the roof at all, just a bit of lighting and some sprinklers where we need them. But no mechanical plant, nothing. Super, super lightweight. And I'll explain some of the reasons why it's super lightweight. But that means when it comes to this sort of view of a concourse, like this check-in concourse, that if that check-in needs to change, then it can change, because we don't have— it's column-free space for 150 meters. So quite significant. And when it comes out to the sort of the gate concourses, again, those are all column-free. So the only infrastructure that becomes quite fixed in those sort of instances is the travelators that are taking you out to the gates and the boarding gates themselves. And we have these column funnels, that we call them, and I'll explain what they do. But they're also used as sort of beacons or points of change of movement when you're going upstairs or downstairs. This is a view looking up towards lounges. It's also a view that would take you down to a future APM2. Yeah. a satellite, for example. The whole concourse is 1.7 kilometers long, so that's absolutely at the limits that you need to be for minimum connect times. The whole thing was, was designed around minimum connect times. But one thing that's allowed us to actually make that happen is part of the processes. So we've been working with the Mexican government to improve their processes, especially with their transfer of all domestics. So domestics just mingle with all the internationals. There's no no segregation. And biometrics will be used in terms of controlling anybody who's trying to get on a domestic flight who might want to. And when I say just the sort of issues about the design of the terminal, it's a seismic area. And you think, oh gosh, that must be a really expensive roof. It's a massive surface area. But in fact, it's only— that roof is only, in terms of weight, only 7% of the total structure. It's really, really significant. So all the money is actually in the foundations and in the ground. And just in terms of the environmental design, coming on to the other aspect about making green buildings in terms of sustainability, these funnels work very, very hard. So all the rainwater and all the air gets distributed down them, which means we have no gutters, no perimeter gutters running through. Everything goes— it's almost like the pores on your skin, taking the air and the light all through it. So it's working really, really hard. So in terms of sustainability, we're right up there. We're LEED Platinum. Version four, in terms of recycling water, solar arrays. It's a lead campus approach across where I'm only talking about the terminal, but we've got several several buildings here that we're doing. There's a huge ground transportation center with metro, rail, fast rail, bus, coach, shuttles—you name it—plus air traffic control towers, whole whole range of things. But one other aspect of it is coming on to sort of passenger experience. Because this shell is just encompassing all the space. And we felt that because, again, the experience should go stretch out as far as it can to the aircraft. So the skin comes right down onto what we call the fixed links before you get to the bridges. And every stand is a miles stand, if that means for people who understand that, which means you can have, you know, 2 narrowbodies or 1 widebody and also sort of A380s boarding at the gates, not all of the gates. Right. but a significant number of them. So super flexible. And just to sort of give you a vision of what that is, the other aspects of this airport city, they're all sitting at the front of it. Again, this canopy comes down and covers every part. So it's where you get dropped off. It's where everything that the passenger might be exposed to. Mexico City has torrential rain when it happens. So you have to make sure that everyone's protected all the way through the journey. Yeah. And you can see, you know, just sort of the scale of some of these spaces. Gate rooms, all with electronic boarding, for example. And we've done about 10 different options, depending on which airline, on how they want to board. So they can also actually personalize it for how they want to make that work. And, you know, we hope one day that its longevity would be such that it might sort of be allowed to sort of go right into the future, like in this image. Yeah. So just quickly on last points. Fast travel. The reason why I say flexibility— I'm not going to talk about this. Loads of you have spoken about this all through the conference. Everything can happen and could happen in this terminal. And what our advice has been to our client, the government, is to hold back to making those decisions for the airlines now. Don't get the basic infrastructure in. So you're saying that the government is But let's keep the conversations going to the last possible time, because there's no point in speccing something, and then 3 years later everyone moves in and says, but I've changed my view on the world. So that's the sort of piece of advice we might say. We've mentioned biometrics, but lots of other technologies are coming into play in terms of what people might do— getting food delivered to the gates rather than having to go and sit in a cafe as well, all sorts of ideas like that, using robots. Yeah. They're open to everything in Mexico. They're very, very refreshing in that sense. But just one thing about customer experience and just thing that we've observed, we think that customer experience— we always in our terminals want everything to be very intuitive. We shouldn't be relying on too much technology to sort of be able to navigate them. They should be super legible in the first place so you don't have to rely on too much signage or too many other systems to tell you where to go. So, but for us, the passenger experience is coming to something that's more personalized. We know it's changing. We've got millennials, we've got older age groups, and so we're looking to that personalizing gates as well. So a variety of settings, seating choices for the passenger. And wellness is something that you may or may not have heard of, which is accreditation that's come out of California, which I really personally like because it's not just about LEED, which is about the systems in a building. Right. It's about how spaces affect you personally. So it's about the air that you breathe, the water that you drink. And we talk about mind as well, which is something that stimulates you. And a lot of airports are doing this now, integrating art, artifacts, cultural aspects as well, so that when you're there, you feel that, you know, there's something of interest and stimulating as well. But it's all about comfort as well. The future is here. So I just want to finish off with a few exciting images of other things we've done. We've done a lot of work with Virgin Atlantic at Terminal 3 in Heathrow, some refurbishment work, additions and things. But we also did some work for Virgin Galactic in New Mexico. And I'm mentioning this really because, again, everything was about a passenger— a customer focus and a passenger experience. And we found that even when people are talking about space travel, they wanted to get back to what was the essence of the experience of flying. So when we start to look at our airports again, Let's have some of that joy back. And I was saying on my flight here when I came through from Heathrow on Monday— well, left on Sunday, in fact— but I got onto an A380. I didn't even know I was on an A380 until I looked at the seat card because everything had been so internalized. It wasn't until I got on the plane, and then I was very excited because I love A380s, but I didn't even know that. So we want to sort of say, you know, let's still Let's all make that something very special. Let's get back to the passion of what is about flying. Environmental design— we learned a lot through the approaches of Virgin Galactic in terms of— we looked at closed-loop systems, everything being totally sustainable, and because we were working in a desert environment. And again, all of the customers that we interviewed for Virgin Galactic were keen to have a direct relationship to the operations. They wanted to feel the excitement of being able to see the spaceships. all the operations that exist. We do a lot of research and development. And just a couple of— a few final projects. One of them is we won a competition to build on the moon. Yes. So, and in fact, that came out of a concept of using 3D printers. After Nike, we're the second most prolific 3D printing company in the world, which is amazing. But we worked with the European Space Agency and developed new systems for using 3D printers and moon dust, or simulated moon dust, to say that when you go and build on the moon, that you can actually have something that is using local resources and local materials. And again, all the research was again about how people would respond to those environments. And then the Mars project is one that we're currently in competition, and actually this week we're in the final stages of that. having to do a time-off of printing some elements for that. And just to say, apart from the sort of super high-tech things, drone ports are one last thing that we're doing. Africa has a huge problem in terms of communication, and so with the, you know, and the state of the roads— this isn't an Australian road, this is in Rwanda— but how to get goods and services or medical supplies around. And so the Foster Foundation, as a charity project, has developed a drone port concept that can be built by local people and service those communities. So just to conclude, I think the, the, you know, the one— the messages I have is change is a constant. The future of airports is still always about passenger experience, a personalized experience. We want our terminals to be sustainable, terminals that can allow for rapid changes in processes, technology, and where we develop in the future should consider a better quality of life for all the communities that they serve. Thank you very much. Thank you, Antoinette.

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