Britain’s Norman Foster to design new Mexico City airport

MEXICO CITY (AFP) – Famed British architect Norman Foster and a son-in-law of Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim were named Wednesday to design a sprawling, new international airport for Mexico City costing almost $10 billion.

Once completed, the glass-roofed terminal – shaped like an X reminiscent of the eagle’s open wings in the Mexican flag – will have six runways and serve 120 million passengers per year, four times the existing airport’s capacity.

The new facility will be built next to the current Benito Juarez international airport, which has two terminals but struggles to accomodate the growing number of travelers in Latin America’s second biggest economy.

The government expects the new facility to open in 2019 or 2020, with a double runway at first that could handle 52 million passengers per year, compared to 32 million today.

The airport will reach its full, 120 million-traveler capacity in 50 years and will cover 4,600 hectares of land. Officials revised the project’s price tag to $9.7 billion from an earlier estimate of $9.15 billion.

The government said Foster’s firm and his Mexican colleague Fernando Romero, who is married to Slim’s daughter Soumaya, were unanimously chosen by analysts after an eight-month competition among 20 bidders.

The project was unveiled at a ceremony hosted by President Enrique Pena Nieto at his official Los Pinos residence with the two architects on hand.

Pena Nieto said that while the airport will open well after his single term ends in 2018, “it is important for Mexico to have a world-class airport.”

Former president Vicente Fox sought to build a new airport in 2001 but abandoned the project when farmers protested the planned expropriation of land. This time, the project will be built on federal land.

Foster, winner of the prestigious Pritzker Prize for architecture in 1999, has designed the Hong Kong airport and Beijing’s dragon-like Terminal 3.

Celebrated for his ambitious glass and steel designs, he is also behind London’s “Gherkin” skyscraper and the restoration of the Reichstag parliament building in Berlin.

Fernando Romero Enterprise FR-EE, meanwhile, has designed Mexico City’s Soumaya Museum, which was commissioned by Slim.

Foster said the new airport will be “the first of its kinds in the world,” promising to create one of the most sustainable airports in the world.

Travelers arriving at the airport will be greeted by a circular garden lined with cacti and a road whose shape was inspired by the snake eaten by the eagle in Mexico’s flag.

The facility will produce its own energy, with a ventilation system that will allow it to barely use air conditioning or heating.

“It has a different shape, different structure, it doesn’t have a conventional roof, it doesn’t have vertical walls, it doesn’t have columns in the normal sense,” Foster said.

“The colors, the patterns are very special to Mexico … and also the quality of monumentality in the works of earlier civilizations,” he said.

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