Renderings of the new plans for a $1.6 billion makeover of Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, unveiled by the city on May 6, look captivating and persuasive at first glance.
That’s not a surprise; it’s how renderings are supposed to look. Their goal is to make a project look its best and to convince clients and the public that it’s worth building.
That’s certainly the case with the airport plan.
But it’s not yet clear whether the $1.6 billion final product match today’s glossy images when the work is finished in 2032. I hope it will and I’m optimistic, but the design isn’t there yet.
The project is being planned by Paslay Group, a consulting firm based in Fort Worth that specializes in airports. The Dallas-based architecture firm of Corgan is the lead designer.
Corgan is a large, global practice with 19 offices mainly in the U.S. It has more than 1,000 employees and no single trademark style or identity.
The airport project is shaping up as typical of today’s impersonal corporate modern architecture. It’s one of many signals in Cleveland that the era of star architects, or “starchitects,” such as Frank Gehry, Cesar Pelli and Lord Norman Foster, who gave their projects a signature look, is over.
The blander, depersonalized appearance of glassy new towers, such as the Sherwin Williams headquarters, or the Lumen apartments at Playhouse Square, is more typical now.
This doesn’t mean the airport will be mediocre. The Corgan website include images of the firm’s elegant-looking work at Nashville International Airport, completed in collaboration with Fentress Architects of Denver. Corgan’s work at Terminal C in LaGuardia in New York is also handsome, and it successfully integrates public art by artists including Rashid Johnson.
Will the Cleveland project have the same polish inside and out? Will it feature rich materials and fine details? It’s too soon to say.
Focal point
The centerpiece of the plan is a new main terminal. Renderings portray it as a big, luminous rectangle of glass topped with a wavy roof designed to evoke waves on Lake Erie.
In the renderings, the building glows in tones of pearl and amber against the blue light of the “magic hour’’ after sunset, a time of day that has become a cliché of architectural renderings and photography. Some of the renderings also show the project from flattering angles, including ones that can’t be seen except by birds or drones.
The wave roof is appealing and easy to understand, but it also feels a bit facile and simplistic. The waves have a monotonous rhythm and don’t look integral with the rest of the structure below them. The design could use more dynamism, and something to make the roof click with the rest of the structure as if it were an integral part of it and not simply glued on top.
More work to come
Bryant Francis, appointed as the city’s director of airports two years ago, told City Council’s Committee on Transportation and Mobility in a May 14 meeting that the project’s design is about 15% complete.
The photorealistic quality of the renderings suggests that things are much further along.
Francis pledges that the design will only get better in coming months.
As the project evolves, City Council and the City Planning Commission should insist on seeing plans and cross sections — which the airport hasn’t released yet — plus renderings that portray the terminal from sidewalks or streets, not just imaginary viewpoints in the sky.
Meanwhile, the airport has a lot of other work to do to make way for the new terminal.
First, it will create a 1,600-space Gold Lot for surface parking next to the long-disused Concourse D, plus a new tunnel for the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority’s Red Line trains.
A new garage with 4,000 to 6,000 spaces will be constructed on the site of the existing Orange Lot east of the existing garage. The existing garage will then come down, making way for the four-year construction of the new, $1.1 billion main terminal building where the garage now stands. All the work will be paid for by the airlines that use the airport.
After the new terminal is built, the existing main terminal, portions of which date back to the 1950s, will be demolished. New walkways will connect the new terminal to the existing concourses, A, B and C.
Gutsy move
Despite the concerns they raise, the new plans represent a gutsy change in thinking on the city’s part. After having committed to rebuilding the existing main terminal largely in its own footprint, the city and the airport had the good sense to change course.
Francis said he and airport staffers realized during a fresh analysis over the past year and a half that it made more sense to scrap the old terminal and build a new one to accommodate air traffic that had bounced back after the pandemic and shows signs of continued growth. The move also makes better use of the airport’s tightly squeezed site 10 miles southwest of downtown.
No one will miss the existing terminal. The boomerang-shaped structure has morphed over the years into a cramped, rag-tag collection of additions and modifications with too few windows and too much visual noise from retail stores and advertising, and art that’s poorly displayed.
More space, more walking and something weird
The new terminal, with 895,000 square feet on all levels, will be more than twice the size of the old one, at 380,000 square feet. There will be room to breathe.
Ceilings will also be higher; they’ll average 30 feet and will range from 27 to 33 feet. That compares favorably with the existing terminal, in which ceilings average roughly 18 feet and range from 16’-10” to 18’-7”.
Walking distances, however, will get longer. The distance from the bottom of the escalator in the existing main terminal to the end of Concourse C is 1,965 feet, the airport said.
The comparable distance in the future will be 2,490 feet. The walk to the end of Concourse B will be even longer, given the removal of a direct route through the center of the airport complex.
The airport stated in an email that the upcoming project is “landside focused [and] doesn’t provide better accesses to the existing concourses.’’ Translation: Improving traffic flow, parking and the terminal are the highest priorities.
The strangest aspect of the design is that when the old terminal is demolished it will leave behind a strange-looking, landlocked infield of perhaps eight to 10 acres between the new terminal and concourses A, B and C, and the walkways connecting them around the big empty space.
Will those walkways have windows looking out onto the strange void outside, or will they be windowless and filled with art displays or schmeared with advertising? So far, there’s nothing in the plans to indicate how the airport is thinking about these weird connector spaces, or what to do with the empty acres at the heart of the plan.
Francis said in an email following up after an interview that “there will be greater options to consider [regarding the concourses] following demolition of the existing headhouse. This could include how future airside facilities are oriented, their scale, and whether there will be new construction, [and] renovation of existing concourses, or a combination.’’
Caveats, uncertainties
Of course, it's disappointing that the existing concourses, which feel oppressively constricted in comparison to those in other U.S. airports, won’t be enlarged or replaced until after 2032. The future of Concourse D, a mid-field relic of the days when airport was a hub for Continental Airlines, is likewise undetermined.
For all the concerns it raises, the new terminal presents big possibilities to improve the travel experience. For instance, it will have a single security checkpoint rather than the confusing mélange shoehorned into the existing terminal. It’s a chance to add clarity, efficiency and a sense of human dignity to a process that can now feel stressful and dehumanizing.
It's also encouraging to see that the plans call for plenty of greenery inside and outside the new terminal. Nature, art and water imagery will be woven into the project in response to a survey in which the airport collected 2,200 responses from Clevelanders about what gives them a “sense of place’’ in their city. Branding Cleveland as a freshwater capital in the Great Lakes is smarter than waxing nostalgic about early 20th century industry.
Traveling to and from the airport could change radically depending on whether the NFL Browns move from the downtown lakefront to a new covered stadium they want to build in Brook Park at Snow Road. Extensive modifications to the surrounding highway and road network could be needed, and it's unknown who will pay and who will benefit from those changes. The airport obviously should have extensive input, but the roadways adjacent to the airport are outside its footprint and beyond its direct control, Bryant said.
For now, it’s clear that revising the airport is a huge opportunity to create something as iconic and memorable as any of the great buildings that give the city its identity and sense of place. The question is whether the airport and its design team can meet that standard. They’ve made a strong start, but they have yet to bring it in for a smooth landing.
