Overview
A 500,000 m² terminal building shaped like a manta ray, stretching roughly 1.5 km along the apron with a roof spanning up to 80 m. Studio Fuksas’ Terminal 3 increased the airport’s capacity by 58% — lifting throughput to 45 million passengers a year — and on opening on 28 November 2013 was the largest single public building in the city. Its double-skin envelope, a perforated aluminium-and-glass mesh, dissolves the boundary between roof and façade.
Scope
This work pre-dates OnceMore. Dr. Milos Dimcic carried it out as an employee of Knippers Helbig Advanced Engineering, where he wrote the software that generated the terminal’s structure and façade — approximately 350,000 unique steel members and 60,000 unique aluminium-glass façade elements (4.5 × 1.5 m) covering more than 300,000 m².
Outcome
At the time, this was the largest parametrically generated free-form façade and structure in the world. All glass remained planar despite the double-curved envelope, and every element was produced to a precision of 0.000001 m, ready for production.
Capabilities Applied
