Building Africa's Next Air Travel Hub: The Steel and Glass Infrastructure That Makes It Possible
Somewhere on the African continent right now, a planning team is working on a project that will define air travel for their country for the next fifty years. It might be a new terminal at an expanding hub. It might be a greenfield airport serving a fast-growing secondary city. It might be a major renovation of an existing facility that hasn't kept pace with traffic growth. Whatever the specific brief, the structural and envelope decisions being made in that planning process will determine whether the finished building performs at the level the country needs — or falls short of it within a decade. The airport in this photograph represents the standard that new aviation infrastructure in Africa should be benchmarked against. The Terminal Roof: Span, Light, and Identity The most immediately legible element of any airport terminal is its roof. At the scale of a major hub, the roofline is the building's identity — visible from the air, visible from the approach road, visible from ev...