Architecture News Plus (ANP) – Architecture and Design Magazine

IAH Airport Parking Facility

This is a project by EASTON+COMBS and it is located at Houston, Texas, United States. There are eleven images for IAH Airport Parking Facility.

: © EASTON+COMBS

Project images

Designer's statement

Architecture and the Spatial Protocols of Contemporary Travel

The parking facility for the Bush International Airport Houston is a private commercial extension of the airports infrastructure and economic fabric. The project functions as an intermodal link from automobile travel to the airport terminal.

During the last decade the Bush Intercontinental Airport Houston has expanded at an accelerated rate accommodating an ever growing culture of commercial air travel. In tandem with this development the surrounding rural landscape has developed into a transitional zone of commercial development and infrastructure responding directly to the economies of travel. As a virtual reciprocal action to the airports expansion, these transitional zones have seen layers of private commercial development respond to and feed from the airport as an economic magnet.

The IAH Airport Parking Facility is a direct programmatic response as a participant in this secondary economy of the transitional zone outlying the airports municipal boundaries. In this sense the project becomes part of the larger infrastructural condition of the airport and requires an architectural response which addresses multiple scales of landscape, physically and virtually, both at the scale of air travel, and at the scale of the commercial infrastructural landscape of the larger economic ecology of airport.

Two primary values of landscape and threshold express and reinforce the ritual of travel throughout the project. The volume of program dedicated to the housing of the automobile allows an architectural expression of landscape on a conceptual and figural level, both from the air and in the horizon. The open air structures propose an environment of over scaled waiting halls that dispatches and receives the traveler. The Administration Building operates at another scale to form the initial and final architectural threshold of travel, bringing the body, via the vehicle, into a pressured spatial relationship with the building through its 100 foot long linear cantilever.

Location: Bush International Airport, Houston, Texas, USA
Phase One Site: 11 acres,
Parking Canopies: 220,000 sqf. [20,438sqm.]
Administration Building: 3,000 sqf. [279sqm]
Cost: 7 Million USD
Status: Phase One Completed 2005
principal architects: EASTON+COMBS
Civil: Lentz Engineering, L.C.
Structural: Bihner Chen Engineering, Inc.
M.E.P.: RH George & Associates