New Terminal Buildings at Madrid Barajas Airport, Spain

The design of the new terminal buildings at Madrid Barajas Airport was the result of a design competition, calling for a simple repetitive building layout to facilitate later extensions. An eye-catching gullwing roof covered a framed building structure made up of a 72 m square module repeated end to end, or side by side, to create the long narrow piers, or broad central areas, of the terminal buildings. The competition-winning concept was developed into an apparently conventional structural layout, with concrete columns on a 9 m × 18 m grid and a composite precast/in situ concrete floor slab supported on in situ concrete beams. The column layout, however, favoured a one-way spanning floor slab and transverse support beams were, therefore, not required. Lateral stability was provided by column cantilever action. This arrangement gave great flexibility in the size and location of floor openings, formed by omitting the floor slab between adjacent longitudinal beams anywhere along the length of the building. In order to achieve a shallow depth of floor structure and minimise deflection, the longitudinal beams were post-tensioned. Although the many structural elements making up the terminal buildings are individually conventional, they have been combined in a way that produces a result as striking as it is practical.