Passenger terminal building

The passenger terminal is an essential link in an airport's overall infrastructure: it is the first building with which passengers come into contact on arriving in a country. It is also the last building through which passengers pass before leaving that country. The passenger terminal enables people and their baggage to be transferred from one mode of ground transportation to another, by air, and vice versa. It is therefore the site of the administrative and technical processes that make this transfer possible, through various stages (ticket sales, passenger and baggage check-in, police, customs and security checks, boarding). But it's also a place where people change their mode of travel: people generally arrive at a terminal in small groups (buses, cabs, private vehicles) from different horizons, on their way to a destination, accompanied by hundreds of other passengers.

With the development of rail interconnections, airport terminals have become true multimodal hubs. The infrastructure thus acts as a fantastic "passenger reservoir" that feeds a fleet of aircraft. Each of these characteristics of the terminal generates specific space requirements:

• passenger and baggage circulation areas;

• filters (administrative or technical, for the passenger or his luggage);

• waiting, amenity, leisure and commercial areas.

The aim of this article is to present the fundamental elements for programming this type of airport terminal infrastructure. We'll take a look at how a terminal works, how to size it and the design constraints specific to this type of building, based on feedback from architectural programming in this field.

It's important to stress, however, that terminal programming is not an exact science (this equipment being at the heart of the interactions of different technical, political, commercial and social environments, in perpetual evolution). This is no doubt why there are few reference documents: the experience of the programmer, designer and manager will remain paramount. The solution will remain the fruit of a consensus and will never be described, for a given case, in a manual, however complete it may be.