FAR: Flexibility in Airport ARchitectural design

The research deals with project design management and sustainability; it refers to the discipline of Technology of Architecture. Airport terminals are characterized by technical requirements of a building; whereas they also are an infrastructure. The very first requirement in airport terminal design is to respond to demand for passenger air transport. Thus, they must accommodate passenger traffic, by ensuring an adequate capacity. But the real progression trend of future traffic demand is not certain; it is only possible to issue a forecast while bearing in mind that the future will possibly differ from projections of it. Consequently an airport passenger terminal has to respond to change, in order to accommodate passengers in the number and with the level of service required. It has to accommodate such changing travel demand. But how to face uncertainty? How does an airport terminal effectively respond to the main requirement - which is to accommodate and process passengers - through a proper, correct and effective design over its lifecycle? Recent research developments suggest answers to uncertainty by adopting design procedures for flexibility in building lifecycles. Embracing change means to face uncertainty and giving the right inputs to design processes. In particular operative flexibility is required as an input to design, enable and make possible product and environmental flexibilities, as a result. Interesting approach and solution enabling flexibility as a design input are suggested by the recent research developments in life cycle costing, going beyond its usual use as a purely economic tool. The experimental methodology of the Design Catalogue 1has been set up by an American research team in this framework applied to a parking garage. The evaluation method supports the designer with forecasting possible future scenarios for the development of the building and with using this information as input to the design process. The research aimes at adapting this method as a tool for the planning phase of an airport terminal, focusing on the core aspects concerning the tailoring. Indeed at first, the general Catalogue methodology has been embedded within the general layout of a design process of an airport terminal. Then, the model for the evaluation of economic performance in the lifecycle, core of the methodology, has been tailored to one specific airport terminal. In the end, through a data collection on field and one iteration of the model, the algorithms were embedded in an automatized spreadsheet, as a tool for the pre-briefing (planning) phase. At the end of the research, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats have been identified and highlighted. The discussion of possible future developments of the work involves e.g.: the portability to other terminal cases; more tests for the validation of the model tailored; guidelines for the application of the results to other cases; exploration of the full decision support level for the methodology; tool upgrading concerning above all sheet C1; guidelines for the use of the tool. Scientific dissemination of the partial results was managed while the research work was ongoing.