Ben Gurion International Airport, Terminal 3, Tel Aviv, Israel
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Moshe Safdie & Associates, Karmi Architects
Airports are the most complicated of buildings, having as much in common with massive machines as with works of architecture. Yet we experience them as architecture, which leaves architects with the challenge of designing a space that is pleasant, secure, efficient, and distinctly of its place. Ben Gurion's Terminal 3 evokes the character of the Israeli landscape with elements such as walls of Jerusalem stone and a round open-air skylight through which sun and rain pour down into a central rotunda.
Arriving passengers exit the terminal into a garden, rather than the typical taxiway. And security is achieved not through heavy blast-walls and cordons, but with an openness that allows for surveillance -- and, in the process, brings natural light into the building.
The architects credit the project's success to their unusual, if sometimes strained, collaboration. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is an international firm with experience in megaprojects. The critical local knowledge came from Israeli-born American architect Moshe Safdie and Israeli architects Ram and Ada Karmi. "The building is a result of an international firm having the benefit of local knowledge, of people who really know the land," says Roger Duffy, principal designer of the airport for SOM.
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