Queen Alia Airport by Foster + Partners opens in Amman, Jordan
The Airport designed by Foster & Partners has an annual capacity of 3.5 million passengers.
The airport’s design resonates a sense of place and local architecture, as for instance the domed roof, which from the air echoes the black flowing fabric of a bedouin tent.
A landscaped plaza in the forecourt of the airport allows family groups to congregate to welcome or bid farewell to relatives.
The building is mainly concrete and the high thermal mass provides passive environmental control. This is important as the summer temperature has a great variation between day and night. The complex geometry of the roof design has been developed by the architects. The tessellated roof canopy comprises of a series of shallow concrete domes.
The domes branch out from the supporting columns like the leaves of a desert palm and daylight floods concourse through split beams at the column junctions, echoing the veins of a leaf. A geometric pattern based on traditional Islamic forms has been applied to each exposed soffit.
The Airport has a flexible modular solution for expansion to accommodate four times of this capacity within 25 years.
Daylight floods the concourse through split beams at the column junctions
