The overview
With a design in line with development projects sweeping through downtown San Antonio, the new terminal will evoke a sense of place, using natural light, local materials and local color palettes.
According to SA Airport documents, creating a sense of place was a major priority for several stakeholders, such as city leaders, community members and airport users. To pinpoint and establish a set of guiding principles for the design, the project consultant team orchestrated several workshops with SA Airport staff and executive leadership. These workshops identified four key guiding themes.
Design vision themes:
- Integrate natural colors, textures and landscape of the San Antonio region, including water, native landscaping and trees
- Create an environmental balance and serene peaceful spaces with vibrant and colorful spaces that embody the welcoming culture of San Antonio and the exuberant spirit of Fiesta
- The airport design should connect to nature and provide an abundance of natural light and views to the outdoors at every opportunity
- Incorporate regionally sourced stone, material and art referencing San Antonio’s culture and history of craftsmanship
“With our partner, Lake/Flato, we collaborated on how to develop a response to the technical aspects to create a vision for a uniquely San Antonio sense of place,” he said.
The details
To pay homage to the city’s unique history, culture and environment, the designers chose to create an indoor-outdoor transition, built around regional plants, limestone, bridges, water features and walkways reminiscent of the River Walk. Trupiano said adding these touches helped ground the design in the city’s architecture and the natural environment of Central Texas.
“[The] Paseo is meant to be a landscaped, kind of a dry landscape, environment that reflects the Hill Country vegetation, but then building on that River Walk theme, we're crossing over that Paseo with bridges," Trupiano said. "One of the beautiful things about going down to the River Walk, or even if you go out further to the Pearl and see some of the bridges, no two are the same. [Each one is] just a little bit different."
Trupiano said the influence of the city's Spanish-colonial architecture, fiesta colors and geography is what makes the design so uniquely San Antonian.
“These really build on those key features about Hill Country landscapes and the San Antonio water story, to start to build a response that hopefully feels like home to the people that are there, but also to visitors that their first impression is, ‘I feel like I've just arrived in San Antonio,’” Trupiano said.
“[The concept of The Mercado] tries to create that market style feel, where we have the flexibility to move different things in-and-out to create different vendor experiences. So we have all of our shopping and our retail components, those form one side of The Mercado, but then the other half is envisioned as kind of that food hall type of experience,” Trupiano said.
Trupiano explained that The Mercado is divided into a shopping section and a food hall section, and features an organic design, allowing for a natural flow of movement.
“We've envisioned that the food hall can stretch into a gourmet food market that has grab-and-go type amenities in there, but it allows us to collaborate and have all these things feel like a vibrant street,” Trupiano said. “There's also a [vision of a] performance stage in there as well, so that the airport [can] curate musical talent throughout the seasons, and they bring people in on certain days of the week to do small and little performances,” Trupiano said.
Trupiano said the design also centers around three principles: accessibility, sustainability and San Antonio’s military culture.
“While the sense of place is a huge component that helps define the experience, accessibility, sustainability and a commitment to the military are three other sub-themes that we are really focused on as we finalize our design,” Trupiano said.
To ensure that the design went above and beyond standard accessibility requirements, the airport assembled a universal design working group composed of roughly 30 members. Through a series of workshops, airport officials received over 200 comments on how to create a more accessible space.
“There are some unique experiences that the disabled community has in San Antonio, whether it's the amount of military [veterans], or [those] with children or folks that otherwise might struggle to have similar experiences. We wanted to make sure that we adapted to meet as many of these needs as we possibly could,” Trupiano said.
Additionally, Trupiano said the new terminal will feature an expanded USO for military personnel.
“We are engaged in developing USO facilities that will be on par with some of the largest airports within the US, so we're really focused on making sure that that is a first rate experience for those, those visitors that are transiting either to San Antonio for their training, or for people that have already retired from their career but still utilize the airport and want to take it take advantage of those opportunities to have access to USO,” Trupiano said.
Lastly, the terminal’s design will also focus on sustainability, using innovative design materials, such as low energy glazing glass panes, solar shades, natural light and watering plants with wastewater.
The background
Trupiano said Corgan has been working in aviation for over 70 years, starting out with a few smaller airports.
Over the years, Corgan has been contracted for multiple large scale projects, such as the Sacramento International Airport’s terminal B, the new terminal in La Guardia and the Shanghai airport satellite concourse.
Other airports that Corgan worked on include the Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, Tulsa International Airport and the Tallahassee International Airport. Corgan has also been contracted in the Caribbean, throughout Florida and internationally.
Trupiano said Corgan’s speciality is recognizing each airport’s unique needs and tailoring the design around them.
“Any of the aviation terminals [we design] are going to be designed [around] the community’s needs [and] the individual needs of that airport,” Trupiano said.
Stay tuned
The new terminal broke ground in December and is estimated to be completed mid-2028.
