You think Richard Rogers Partnership’s Heathrow Terminal 5 is about as big as big can be? Well prepare to be amazed: the practice’s Barajas Airport terminal in Madrid is twice the size – and even more elegant.
Compared with Heathrow Terminal 5, Madrid Barajas Airport is a veritable jumbo jet of a building.
It has a total floor area of 1.1 million m2, or twice the size of its British counterpart. And although design started in 1996, seven years after T5, its undulating, aerodynamic form is due to take-off next spring, two years before T5.
And Barajas is shaping into a more elegant beast, than T5. For one thing, it has retained the flourishes that were lost at T5 – which is ending up a vast six-storey shed beneath a shallow vaulted roof.
The comparison is apt, as both terminals are planned as European hubs with throughputs of up to 35 million passengers a year, and both are the brain-children of the same British architect, Richard Rogers Partnership.
More to the point, both terminals originally shared the same design concept of several multistorey strips of building, each with its own wave-like roof. The problem was that Heathrow was beset by a tiny site, vociferous local residents and a prolonged public inquiry that resulted in the building being drastically compressed in form.
No such misfortune befell Barajas. Actually, rather than a jumbo jet, Madrid’s terminal resembles a flock of birds in flight. Each of its four parallel strips of accommodation is capped in a symmetrical curvilinear roof like a pair of wings that project prominently at either end.
Inside the building, the strips stretch up to 1.2 km in length and cover six storeys of accommodation, three of which are below ground. The strips are separated by “canyons” or longitudinal voids three storeys deep. The wing roofs glide over strips of accommodation and swoop down over the canyons. They are punctuated by rapid sequences of large circular rooflights, which channel daylight into the three upper floors.
Passengers will not pass along the four strips of accommodation, as one might expect. Instead they will take the more spectacular route of cutting right across the strips at right angles and crossing the canyons on wide open bridges.
The internal form is minimal and graceful. The three-storey strips are supported along their centre lines on paired concrete columns. At third floor level, the columns split into four diagonal steel arms that reach up to support the roof. Further support comes from Y-shaped steel trees that stretch out over the canyons.
No Rogers building dare show its face without liberal splashes of primary colours. At Barajas, all the steel trees are picked out in primrose yellow, giving the vast building a lively yet calming atmosphere. A warm, reassuring touch is added by pale bamboo strips that make up the undulating ceiling.
The combined effect is a building that is awesome in scale yet refreshingly light, airy, spacious and entirely open to view. Whereas most airports are disorientating assault courses, Barajas promises to be a model of legibility and clarity, despite its immense scale. And despite Rogers’ best efforts, the odds are against T5 achieving the same success.
The four strips of building are arranged in parallel and run up to 1.2 km in length
Project team
client Spanish National Airports Authority
architects Richard Rogers Partnership, Estudio Lamella airport
consultants and services engineers Initec, TPS
structural engineers Anthony Hunt Associates, TPS
quantity surveyors Hanscombe, Gabinete
main contractor UTE
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