People’s Choice Award in Fentress Global Challenge 2019, Future Airport Design Competition

Since 20th century, the demand of air travel has escalated exponentially and become a momentous proliferation as daily transit in the near future. Whereas airport has emerged as an significant architecture typology as transition capital representing a country. However, upon the ascending rise in passenger number, mankind is anticipating the huge lapse in current typologies of airport in term of turnaround speed, building footprint, travelling distance, sustainability, collective experience etc. So, we questioned- what could be the evolutionary of airport as human’s mobility evolves?

Being a well-developed metropolis, Hong Kong is articulated with bustling rail transport despite its archipelago geographic. Whereas the future of railway might evolved into Hyperloop, which is a new mode of railway transportation proposed by Elon Musk in 2012 that runs through pressurized sealed tube efficiently without resistance. Meanwhile, capsule fuselage loading system is emerged as one of the future development of aviation technology. Contemplating the existing vestiges until 2075, we envision the possibility of a synthetic amalgamation- the integration of Hyperloop tube system and capsule fuselage technology.

The great leap in technology advancement would manifest a subversive paradigm transformation towards current airport morphology, from a centralized mass into a vessels-like network. While refraining the inefficiency of turnaround, vast runways, long travel distance, huge labor force, convoluted programmed and so on, the new model suggest a seamless transition from rail to flight- elementary yet expeditious. This gesture is denying the airport as an isolated system in the collective locomotion structure, bringing aviation closer to our regular transit as an unification where we expect a new civic role. This notion adopt the ideology of Hong Kong as a capital of movement and efficient, being a creation of international identity.

Yet the other part of this conception advocates ecological concern to reserve a greater land compare to traditional typology, as Hong Kong is struggling with limited amount of free lands. Besides of having forest reserve and series of renewable-energy plant, the central land will becomes the aviation headquarter and global hub for international activities, forming a greener and livelier airport that grows as a self-sufficient island. In a larger scale, this approach is fostering the restoration of nature, leaving a gasp to regrow where mankind took away. Above all, this evolutionary of airport is aimed to be a futuristic epitome of mobility and granting a new definition of movement in 2075.