Official opening of Queen Alia International Airport by Foster & Partners
22/03/2013.
[Amman] Jordan
metalocus, PEDRO NAVARRO
metalocus, PEDRO NAVARRO
Yesterday marked the official opening of Queen Alia International Airport, the spectacular new gateway to Amman.
The airport has a highly efficient passive design, which has been inspired by local traditions, and is based on a flexible modular solution that allows for future expansion – the new building secures the city’s position as the main hub for the Levant region and allows the airport to grow by 6 per cent per annum for the next twenty-five years, increasing capacity from 3.5 million to 12 million passengers per annum by 2030.
The airport has a highly efficient passive design, which has been inspired by local traditions, and is based on a flexible modular solution that allows for future expansion – the new building secures the city’s position as the main hub for the Levant region and allows the airport to grow by 6 per cent per annum for the next twenty-five years, increasing capacity from 3.5 million to 12 million passengers per annum by 2030.
Official opening of Queen Alia International Airport by Foster & Partners.
Vista de pajaro del acceso. Aeropuerto Internacional Queen Alia por Foster & Partners.
Structure. Queen Alia InternaStructure. Queen Alia International Airport by Foster & Partners.tional Airport by Foster & Partners. Click above to see larger image.
Interior. Queen Alia International Airport by Foster & Partners.
Lobby. Queen Alia International Airport by Foster & Partners.
Interior. Queen Alia International Airport by Foster & Partners.
Interior. Queen Alia International Airport by Foster & Partners.
Ceiling. Queen Alia International Airport by Foster & Partners.
Ceiling. Queen Alia InternatiCeiling. Queen Alia International Airport by Foster & Partners.onal Airport by Foster & Partners. Click above to see larger image.
Overview airport, access. Queen Alia International Airport by Foster & Partners.
Overview airport. Queen Alia International Airport by Foster & Partners.
Solar roof. Queen Alia International Airport by Foster & Partners.
Night view, access. Queen Alia International Airport by Foster & Partners.
Sketch. Queen Alia International Airport by Foster & Partners.
Roof plan. Queen Alia International Airport by Foster & Partners.
Groun floor level. Queen Alia International Airport by Foster & Partners.
First floor plan. Queen Alia International Airport by Foster & Partners.
Second floor plan. Queen Alia International Airport by Foster & Partners.
Section. Queen Alia International Airport by Foster & Partners.
Section. Queen Alia International Airport by Foster & Partners.
Solar roof. Queen Alia International Airport by Foster & Partners.
Memory of project by Foster + Partners
Queen Alia International Airport continues the practice’s explorations of the airport terminal as a building type and sets out a vision for an environmentally sensitive, regionally apt, airport architecture. Designed to serve as the main gateway to Amman – one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world – its design resonates with a sense of place and local culture. Strategically the building secures Amman’s position as the main hub for the Levant Region. Logistically, it allows the airport to grow by 6 per cent per annum for the next twenty-five years, increasing capacity from 3 million to 12.8 million passengers per annum by 2030.
In response to local building expertise and Amman’s climate, where summer temperatures vary markedly between daytime and night time the building is constructed entirely from concrete, the high thermal mass of the material providing passive environmental control.
The tessellated roof canopy comprises a series of shallow concrete domes, which extend to shade the facades. To enable seamless future expansion, each dome is a modular unit. The domes branch out from the supporting columns like the leaves of a desert palm and daylight floods the concourse through split beams at the column junctions. Echoing the veins of a leaf, a geometric pattern based on traditional Islamic forms is applied to each exposed soffit.
The terminal is glazed on all sides to open up long views to the aircraft on the apron and aid orientation. Two piers of departure gates run along either side of the central building, which contains the main processing areas and shops, lounges and restaurants.
Between these volumes, open-air courtyards draw on vernacular Arabic architecture and contribute to the terminal’s environmental strategy: the plants and trees help to filter pollution and pre-condition the air before it is drawn into the air handling system. In celebration of the tradition for family groups to congregate at the airport, the forecourt has been enlarged to create a landscaped plaza with seating, shaded by trees, where people can gather to bid farewell or welcome returning travellers.
More information
Architects
Collaborators
Collaborating Architect.- Maisam - Dar Al-Omran JV
Structural Engineer.- Buro Happold. Quantity Surveyor: David Langdon. M+E Engineer: Buro Happold. Landscape Architect: Dar Al-Handasah. Lighting Engineer.- World of Lights. Additional Consultants: NACO, ADPi, Zuhair Fayez Partnership, Rahe Kraft.
Award.- Cityscape Architectural Review Awards – Winner Transport category, Queen Alia International Airport, Amman.
Client
Airport International Group, The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan Ministry of Trans, Joannou & Paraskevaides (Overseas) Ltd, J&P-AVAX S.A., Airport International Group P.S.C.
Dates
Appointment.- 2005.
Construction start.- 2008.
Completion.- 2012 Opening.- 21/03/2013.
Award
Cityscape Architectural Review Awards – Winner Transport category, Queen Alia International Airport, Amman.
NORMAN FOSTER
Norman Foster is considered by many to be the most prominent architect in Britain. He won the 1999 Pritzker Architecture Prize and the 2009 Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes Prize.
Lord Foster rebuilt the Reichstag as a new German Parliament in Berlin and designed a contemporary Great Court for the British Museum. He linked St. Paul's Cathedral to the Tate Modern with the Millennium Bridge, a steel footbridge across the Thames. He designed the Hearst Corporation Building in Manhattan, at 57th Street and Eighth Avenue.
He was born in Manchester, England, in 1935. Among his firm’s many other projects are London’s City Hall, the Bilbao Metro in Spain, the Canary Wharf Underground Station in London and the renovated courtyard of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery in Washington.
In the 1970s, Lord Foster was one of the most visible practitioners of a high-tech architecture that fetishized machine culture. His triumphant 1986 Hong Kong and Shanghai bank building, conceived as a kit-of-parts plugged into a towering steel frame, was capitalism's answer to the populist Pompidou Center in Paris.
Nicolai Ouroussoff, The Times’s architecture critic, has written that although Lord Foster’s work has become sleeker and more predictable in recent years, his forms are always driven by an internal structural logic, and they treat their surroundings with a refreshing bluntness.
Awarded the Prince of Asturias of the Arts 2009.
METALOCUS > 05.2017
