EuroAirport Basel-Mulhouse-Freiburg Expansion

EuroAirport (Basel Mulhaus Airport) has experienced continuous growth, welcoming just over 8 million travellers annually today, but through incremental upgrades over the years, resulting in a rather constrained terminal building, lacking in clarity of wayfinding and supporting services.

To address these challenges, a substantial extension of the landside terminal facilities is required, encompassing a large departure and arrival hall, enhanced check-in and baggage drop-off facilities, security/scanning control areas, commercial facilities and clear connections to multimodal transportation platforms, including the possibility to integrate into a future railway station.

The key concept was to physically separate the new development from the existing terminal building, via an 8m gap, referenced as the ‘fault line’ between existing and new.

This separation generates several positive results, facilitating the phased construction with minimal operational impact on the existing building, simplifying the fire compartmentation challenges, ensuring both daylight and natural ventilation are viable options for the entire new landside development and ultimately delivering clear and logical pedestrian flows and wayfinding routes from landside (new) to airside (existing) services.

The entire landside development is being fully passively conditioned with some limited heating provided in a few selected areas, in extreme winter conditions. A first in airport design (in temperate climates) that could be defined as a paradigm shift in airport design.