Transportation Centre, Incheon International Airport
Incheon, Seoul, Korea
Terry Farrell & Partners

A sprawling multimodal transit center augments a growing Asian airport

By Nancy Levinson

© Park Young Chea

For more photos click on 'photos & drawings' above. To see the people and products behind this project click on 'people & products.'

Incheon International is an integral part of the infrastructure that South Korea hopes will make Seoul the premier gateway to northeast Asia. To link the airport to multiple modes of ground transportation to the capital more than 30 miles away, came this new building, the sleek, sprawling, intricately coordinated Transportation Centre, designed by Terry Farrell & Partners (TF&P) of London.

Working in close collaboration with Samoo Architects and DMJM, TF&P was given a distinctly contemporary program—a facility whose purpose is to expedite movement, the quicker the better, from one mode of transport to another—from car or subway or train to plane, and the reverse. TF&P, which has experience with this building type (it designed Kowloon Station, which serves Chek Lap Kok Airport in Hong Kong), understood that the most significant challenge of the Transportation Centre was its scale. How could the 820,000-square-foot, six-level complex be made coherent, with its network of rail lines and stations, its acres of structured and surface parking for 5,000 cars, its people-moving and baggage-handling systems? How could it be given a strong and iconic presence in the still vaster aviation world of Incheon International? And even more, how could it be given identity as a Korean place, so that the frequent-flying traveler will know she has landed in Seoul, not Shanghai or Sydney?

TF&P’s scheme, chosen in a limited competition, responds to both the organizational intricacies and iconographical demands of the program. To accommodate the assorted networks for cars, taxis, vans, buses, trucks, subways, trains, baggage, and pedestrians—the airport will eventually serve 100 million passengers per year—the architects have created a somewhat free-form structure whose complex curves and outreaching platforms make it seem, in aerial view, almost beastlike.

The diverse transportation networks all converge in a central Great Hall, a truss-roofed, daylit space that recalls the grand rail terminals of the Victorian Age. Atop the Great Hall is a 130-foot-long, steel-framed airfoil—a birdlike crest for the beastlike building. Not part of the competition-winning design, the airfoil is actually an agile answer to a major programmatic change made midway through the project. The original scheme was crowned with a tall, swan-necked form that was to have housed the air-traffic control tower and was also meant to evoke both images of flight and other buildings that evoke images of flight, notably Eero Saarinen’s terminals at Kennedy and Dulles Airports. But during design development, the Korean airline authority determined that the control tower was not needed logistically and, just as important, was perhaps too obvious, too long-necked a target in the event of conflict between North and South Korea. Supported on three strutlike, steel-clad legs, the airfoil hovers above a 50-foot-diameter oculus that can be opened and closed; oriented to prevailing winds, it draws warm air upward and reduces the building’s cooling load.

Clad in aluminum tiles and encircled by miles of roadway, the Transportation Centre is a sophisticated and extensive environment—a building elongated out to the scale of a landscape. In the midst of this shiny and efficient place, then, it is delightful to find that the architects have inserted, in the open spaces between rail platforms and roadbeds, gardens landscaped in indigenous style, with meandering paths and clusters of rocks and plants. Amid the hustle and bustle of collecting luggage and transferring to ground transport, travelers who have landed at Incheon International can enjoy a glimpse of Korean scenery—a patch of local serenity in the global transit zone.

See the August 2003 issue of Architectural Record for full coverage of this project.

Formal name of Project:
Transportation Centre, Incheon International Airport

Location:
Incheon, Seoul, Korea

Gross square footage:
2,691,000 sq ft

Total construction cost:
£250 million

Owner:
Incheon International Airport Authority

Architect:
Terry Farrell & Partners
7 Hatton Street, London NW8 8PL, UK
T: +44 20 7258 3433
F: +44 20 7723 7059