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HOK and Zaha Hadid bid for world's largest airport

date added: 28.09.2011

HOK and Foster & Partners have confirmed they are bidding for the world’s largest airport — a third facility for Beijing, which would make the city the busiest aviation hub on the planet.

Zaha Hadid and Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners, working with Arup, are believed to be among the other practices preparing designs for what is expected to be a fiercely contested competition.

With eight or nine runways — more than anywhere else in the world — the new airport will be capable of handling between 120 and 200 million largely domestic passengers a year.

The first phase is due for completion in 2015 and enabling work has already begun on a site south-west of the capital, in the rural district of Daxing.

Beijing’s main airport — the second busiest in the world — is in the north of the city. It handled 74 million passengers in 2011, but by 2015 this could rise to 90 million — seven times more than it was designed for.

Its third terminal, already operating at capacity four years after it opened for the 2008 Olympics, was designed by Foster & Partners. It is believed to be the largest airport building in the world, with more floor space than Heathrow’s five terminals combined.

In a sign of its determination not to let Foster’s win again, HOK has teamed up with NACO, the Dutch airport consultant which worked with Foster and Arup on the Olympic terminal.

HOK — which recently completed Delhi airport, the world’s fifth largest — has assembled a team of specialists in its London, Hong Kong and San Francisco offices to work on the project.

The London office was restructured this summer around an expansion of aviation and transport work. It poached Richard Gammon from Aedas to head the division and announced plans to double the number of architects working in both fields.

Other teams believed to be bidding for the new airport are the state-owned Beijing Institute of Architectural Design, the East China Architecture Design & Research Institute and Paris-based airport specialist ADPI.

Source: http://www.bdonline.co.uk/

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