Many Airport terminal planning projects run into budget problems because the requirements-program is created without strategy, and without really questioning existing processes. If airports first define clear strategic goals and turn some “fixed requirements” into more open design questions, they can create much leaner and more effective terminal buildings – and avoid painful and expensive redesigns halfway through the project.
In many of my terminal planning projects, there is this one moment when management suddenly realises that the project does not fit the budget… and the architect replies: “we see hardly any room to reduce costs. The main cost driver is the building area, and this comes directly from the space requirements you, as the client, have defined”.
This usually happens about halfway through concept design. By then, however, the project has often already been running for 1–2 years, especially if it started with an architectural competition. Because such complex projects require extra-large teams, this means that several person-years of work have already been invested.
And only now does the management start to take a closer look at the requirements that were created by their own organisation! What does this mean?
- In the best case, the problem can be solved through smaller optimisations during the remaining concept design stage.
- But in some projects, this leads to a discussion about crucial questions: do the requirements and the budget – or more broadly, the business plan – actually match? Or, even more radical: what kind of terminal do we actually want to plan? What is our strategy as an airport for our own future?
- And in some project this led to an intensive discussion about strategy and future visions, afterwards the project had to be redesigned on a large scale over several months.
If the strategy and following the requirements brief had been examined more carefully at an earlier stage, this could have been avoided.
How Terminal Space Requirements Are Usually Defined
The space program for an airport terminal is created, in most projects, before the planners come on board. If we look more closely at how such requirements are usually developed, we often see the following pattern:
- forecast future peak-hour demand of passengers (or bags) of a certain process (for example check-in or security control)
- throughput rate of the process (how many passengers can be processed per hour on one security lane)
- multiplied by the required area per process unit (for example one security lane)
At this point, people often object that most area requirements are already fully defined by the recommendations of the IATA Airport Development Reference Manual (ADRM). With all due respect: that is unfortunately not the case. In 20 years of airport planning, I have never seen two identical calculations results based on this document. As important and helpful as international benchmark figures would be for airport planners, the IATA document can only provide this to a limited extent.
What I do see again and again are airports that:
- focus too much on the past, instead of using the start of a terminal project as an opportunity to ask what would be desirable for the future
- have departments that add well-meant “hidden reserves” into the demand figures, but do not communicate these transparently
- do not know their own process times, or have not analysed how to optimise them
The task of writing the requirements for a new building project at an airport is, unfortunately, very often delegated almost completely to the users of the building:
“ The new project needs a requirements brief, could you quickly put something together?”But to put it quite directly: defining the fundamental basis of a building project is a strategic task and cannot be done by the working level of an organisation alone. Strategy is a management task.
Start with Strategy, Not with Square Metres
In those projects that handled the development of the brief in a better way, there was a holistic discussion about the goals of the new terminal before starting the space program – a discussion that went beyond “we need to grow” and really reflected on what kind of airport they want to be in 10 or 20 years. For example, the following questions were discussed:
- What should fundamentally work differently in the new terminal compared to today?
- Especially: which processes need to run more efficiently in the future?
- Concrete targets such as: our goal is to increase the capacity per security lane from 150 to 220 passengers per hour.
The result of this work is a set of “strategic guidelines” that allow a much more focused development of the space program.
A Better Approach: Turning rigid Requirements into open Design Questions
At the end of the day, we have to understand that a “perfect space program” (the one with future reserves and flexibility) will, in nine out of ten cases, come into conflict with other project constraints: the available budget or simply the available space. The fundamentals of a building project are so closely interdependent that they cannot be developed in isolation.
We had very good experiences with not fixing certain topics too early in the space program – for example, the question of how much area is needed for gate waiting areas. Instead, we define questions and describe problems that the planners should explore in different options during the first part of concept design stage (or in the competition). These options became then the basis of decision.
In this way, client and planners can approach a question step by step and at a time, where there is already much more information about the future terminal (a floor plan layout draft, for example). Especially with the often very complex dependencies in terminal planning, this open and holistic approach on the program leads to much better results than a rigid, fixed requirement from the start.
