The thick mesh of air routes that encircle the globe is hooked by airports into the hubs of the terrestrial networks that make it possible to connect the global migrations and local transport flows of people, goods, ideas, etc. Airports are extraordinary structures and sites of transition which require increasingly efficient solutions to the complex functional and safety-related aspects of passengers, boarding and alighting from the planes.

 

The intention of my diploma project is to provide a physical structure and to express the experience of these transitional spaces of arrival and departure and people’s powerful emotions connected with these phenomena, while satisfying the programmatic complexity of machinic airport typology.

 

My airport is situated in Bodø, an interesting, ever developing and changing city on the borderline of Artic circle, oriented to an endless artic landscape. The architectural and structural character of the proposal is clearly expressed by two spatial gestures defined by two roof structures: one creating the landside volume of the building and recalling the scale of the city, and another quite intimate scale of waiting lounges , paradoxically related to the air side and to the open space of runaway in a powerful Nordic landscape. The large horizontal roof emerges from the ground and intersects the curved wall that defines the space of the main entrance hall. The intended intimacy of departure lounges directly overlooks apron and runways. These two structural and spatial gestures are unified with the high space of departure hallway and the long horizontal, slender form of the linearly organized airport.