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The architect of the unbuilt Chicago Spire is among the designers vying for the massive O’Hare International Airport expansion project.
The Zurich-based firm of Santiago Calatrava, whose projects include an airport in Bilbao, Spain, and the over-budget World Trade Center transportation center in New York, was one of 12 teams that responded to the city’s Thursday deadline to submit qualifications for the $8.7 billion expansion [...].
— Chicago Tribune
According to the Chicago Tribune, the list of teams bidding for the $8.7 billion Chicago O'Hare International Airport expansion includes big-name firms such as SOM, Perkins+Will, Bjarke Ingels Group, Santiago Calatrava, Gensler, HOK, Fentress Architects, JAHN, Epstein, and Studio Fuksas. View full entry
MVRDV has recently completed The Imprint, a new 2-building art and entertainment complex next to Seoul’s Incheon Airport. Featuring a nightclub in one building and indoor theme park in the other, the windowless structures are part of the larger Paradise City complex of 6 buildings next to South... View full entry
Greenland Wuhan Center, designed to surpass the Shanghai Tower and become China’s tallest building, will be falling short of its planned 636 metres (2086 feet) height, after the local government prescribed a 21 percent reduction in height for the central China supertall, according to an account in local media outlet the Paper. — mingtiandi.com
Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture won the competition back in 2010 to design China's tallest, and the world's 4th tallest, building. The supertall was originally designed to reach 126 floors, however construction halted in August last year stopping at the 96th floor. The height reduction... View full entry
Duangrit Bunnag, the renowned local architect who won the bid to design Suvarnabhumi airport's second terminal, has denied plagiarising the work of a Japanese architect.
"I didn't copy anyone else's work. Those who follow my work will know that I created a similar image in my previous designs, such as for a hotel in Sri Lanka," Mr Duangrit told The Standard, a local online news portal.
— bangkokpost.com
Duangrit Bunnag's firm DBALP Consortium, along with Nikken Sekkei, EMS Consultants, MHPM, MSE and ARJ Consortium, were recently announced as winners of the Suvarnabhumi Airport Terminal 2 Project design contest. Focused on expanding the Thailand airport, the competition design sparked online... View full entry
Mexican President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Friday he would let voters decide whether to continue construction of Mexico City’s new airport, throwing into doubt the country’s biggest public-works project and billions in investment and debt.
The airpot, designed in part by U.K. architect Norman Foster, is about one-third complete. About $5.2 billion has been spent on the infrastructure project, the biggest of the administration of current President Enrique Peña Nieto.
— wsj.com
After softening his original stance on cancelling the new Mexico City International Airport, president-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has now opened up the project's fate to the public. The partially built infrastructure project by Foster + Partners and FR-EE now hangs in the balance of... View full entry
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, Mexico’s next president, is no longer seeking an immediate suspension of Mexico City’s new $13 billion airport, according to a member of his economic transition team.
Abel Hibert, who attended a planning meeting with Lopez Obrador and about 100 aides from the transition team on Tuesday evening, said it was clear that there’ll be no immediate demand to President Enrique Pena Nieto to suspend construction of the airport, at least until a review of the contracts.
— Bloomberg
Canceling the new Mexico City International Airport project due to alleged corruption and wasteful spending was one of the campaign promises of socialist (then) candidate, and now president-elect, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. The tone appears to have softened now to not completely alienate... View full entry
Autonomous 16-passenger vehicles would zip back and forth at speeds exceeding 100 mph in tunnels between the Loop and O’Hare International Airport under a high-speed transit proposal being negotiated between Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s City Hall and billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk’s The Boring Co., city and company officials have confirmed.
Emanuel’s administration has selected Musk’s company from four competing bids to provide high-speed transportation between downtown and the airport.
— Chicago Tribune
Musk's Boring Co. beat out established engineering firms, including Mott MacDonald and JLC Infrastructure, even though it has famously been in business for less than two years and only has a test tunnel near the company's headquarters in the Los Angeles area to show for as construction experience. View full entry
Bombardier Rail Technologies, ACS Infrastructure Development, Balfour Beatty, Fluor Enterprises and HOCHTIEF PPP Solutions North America have all been chosen to deliver a $4.9bn project to design, build and install an automated people mover system at Los Angeles International Airport. [...]
The system will run on a 3.6km elevated dual-lane guideway and will serve six newly-built stations, creating connections between the airport, public and private transportation, and a new car rental facility.
— Construction Global
The tinted world of tomorrow is coming, and airports—mini-cities of steel, concrete and lots and lots of glass—are interested. In a test last fall, Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport outfitted one of its gates with a new type of “smart glass” that can adjust for sunlight exposure. The obvious point is to keep travelers from getting overheated—but the exercise also brought a more lucrative benefit. — Bloomberg
A Cornell-led study at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport found that implementing a new type of electrochromatic 'smart glass' at one of its gates not only led to cooler, more pleasant surface temperatures in the waiting area, but the tinted glass, and the resulting dimmer light in the neighboring bars and... View full entry
Chicago’s City Council on Wednesday approved a multibillion-dollar expansion plan for O’Hare International Airport, after an earlier dispute between the airport’s two largest carriers had previously threatened to snarl the project. — Reuters
"The city of Chicago entered into an agreement with carriers United Airlines, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and Spirit Airlines for airport renovations that include expanding the airport’s existing terminals and increasing the number and availability of some gates," Reuters reports. View full entry
Massachusetts Port Authority (Massport) has chosen global infrastructure firm AECOM and luis vidal + architects to handle the remodeling of Boston Logan International Airport’s Terminal E. The team won the design competition due to their collaborative proposal, which also satisfied Massport’s functional requirements. — Commercial Property Executive
This major remodeling of Boston Logan International Airport’s Terminal E will be lead by AECOM as the prime consultant and architect/engineer of record, and airport design specialist luis vidal + architects as the vision architect. A press statement summarizes the proposed improvements: "The... View full entry
[...] announced the Port Authority's selection of a Mott MacDonald-led consulting team [...] for the redevelopment of John F. Kennedy Airport. This announcement is the next major step in the Governor's plan to transform JFK Airport - which welcomes more international passengers to the United States than any other U.S. airport -- into a unified, world-class operation to accommodate substantial forecasted passenger growth, while helping to further boost the New York City regional economy. — governor.ny.gov
Image via JFK Vision PlanWithout mentioning specific details at this point, the announcement from Governor Cuomo lays out the general scope of this ambitious airport redevelopment project based on the January report from the Airport Advisory Panel, including "the creation of a seamless... View full entry
WOHA unveiled the latest photos of their 103,495 square-foot extension for the Crowne Plaza Changi Airport (CPCA) hotel in Singapore. The extension was completed in a mere 26 days, according to the firm; quite the accomplishment considering the constrained site at one of the world's busiest... View full entry
In the summer of 2014, Anthony McGinty and Michelle Sosa were hired by Los Angeles World Airports to lead a unique, new classified intelligence unit on the West Coast. After only two years, their global scope and analytic capabilities promise to rival the agencies of a small nation-state. Their roles suggest an intriguing new direction for infrastructure protection in an era when threats are as internationally networked as they are hard to predict. — The Atlantic
Being the world's fifth-busiest airport (74,937,004 travelers passed through LAX in 2015) makes this infrastructure megaproject one of the top-ranked terrorist and aviation targets in the country. With billions of dollars spent on the usual airport expansion and modernization projects in recent... View full entry
Ministers approved the long-awaited decision at a cabinet committee meeting on Tuesday.
Transport Secretary Chris Grayling called the decision "truly momentous" and said expansion would improve the UK's connections with the rest of the world and support trade and jobs.
Although Heathrow has always been the favourite among businesses, it has attracted the most opposition from MPs with constituencies near the airport or under flight paths.
— bbc.co.uk
The expansion which had been publicly opposed by Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, Tory MP for Richmond Park, Zac Goldsmith and Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson has been widely debated for years. Funded with private sector cash the new runway will cost £17.6 billion but provide 260,000 more flights... View full entry