Major Expansion Moves Forward in Houston

New Building Will Increase International Services at Bush Intercontinental

By Lesley Hensell

Photo Houston Airport System

Construction on a massive public building at Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston is nearing completion, and as at many new airport buildings, little of the structure will be seen by the majority of passengers.

The 784,000-sq.-ft. International Arrivals Building is expected to open by the end of January. All but 60,000 sq. ft. of the building will be secure; most of the space will house the activities of federal government agencies that control access of passengers into the United States.

These include the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and agencies such as the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The IAB sits between terminals D and E. International passengers arriving at these two terminals will enter the IAB via pedestrian bridges. The building, constructed at a total cost of $440 million, will provide a central location for screening incoming passengers and luggage.

The short history of the IAB is a storyline that has been played out at airports around the state and country. Expansion projects under way before Sept. 11 came to an abrupt halt. Designers and constructors scrambled to make major changes newly required by the federal government's security agencies after the terrorist attacks. And construction was significantly delayed.

Fortunately for the folks at Bush Intercontinental, ground had not yet been broken on the IAB at the time of the attacks. So most major changes were made upfront, and construction began in 2002.

"Due to a changing security environment, as Homeland Security became more aware and more practiced, they were providing us with changes as late as this year," said Kent McLemore, assistant director of aviation and manager of the planning division for the airport. "That has caused somewhat of a delay in finishing the building because of having to make those adjustments."

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Most significantly, the building completely changed after taking into account the weight of security machines added to the plan, said Ruben Martinez, project manager for Houston structural engineering firm Walter P. Moore.

"The addition of these machines added a tremendous amount of load to our floors, and the architecture had to change because the machines started to constrain the open space," Martinez added.

The building's basement level includes baggage handling and baggage rechecking. The first level houses baggage claim, baggage rechecking and a meet-and-greet lobby, while the second floor is home to the primary immigration inspection hall, an in-transit lounge and a Continental Airlines ticket lobby.

The largest two spaces in the building are a 500-ft.-long immigration hall and a baggage collection area with 12 carousels. The immigration hall is so large that "it's like walking onto a covered football field," McLemore said.

The immigration hall includes about 84 booths staffed by the U.S. Transportation Security Administration and other government officials. Its large design is intended to facilitate the flow of traffic - up to 4,500 passengers per hour, compared to the 2,000 international arrivals per hour the airport can handle now, said Eric Potts, deputy director of the City of Houston's Aviation Department.

"We have a baggage-handling system with more than 2,800 lin. ft. of presentation," Potts said.

And it all had to be constructed "on a postage stamp," he added. The building is bounded by an airplane runway on one side, major throughways on two other sides, a parking garage expansion and a new automated people mover station.

"We had limited access for the construction crews, limited staging areas, at times multiple cranes that had to meet the 165-ft. height limits," Potts said. "This meant you had to change some of your [contractors' methods] because you couldn't use bigger cranes. In a nutshell, we actually built this in a box."

The size and design of the building required the use of large-span trusses, Martinez said. This created challenges, since buildings in the Houston area must conform to stringent wind-resistance and uplift code requirements for possible hurricane-force winds.

"If you want a large open area, as was called for in this building's design, you have to have large trusses and diaphragms," Martinez said. "We used structural steel framing with thick concrete composite slab to try and control vibrations, which are always a concern in buildings where a lot of people assemble."

The building does have some distinctive features intended to set it apart from other airport arrival structures, he added.

"The vast majority of the building is conventionally framed, and nobody will ever see or care about much of it," he said. "But from the beginning, the designers were striving to create something different at the Bush airport than from what has been out there up until this point."

To make the building distinctive, the roof of the third-floor ceiling features an open design with curved, smooth three-dimensional pipe trusses. In addition, the building is framed by an atrium on its east side. Designed to look like two halves of an inverted cone, with one half on each side of the building, the atrium was created from structural steel and painted white.

Each pane of glass was a different shape, requiring each to be cut individually, Martinez said.

Key Players:
Owner: Houston Airport System, Houston
Program manager: The PB Team, Houston
Architect: PGAL Architects, Houston and Alexandria, Va.
Structural engineer: Walter P. Moore, Houston
Contractor: Clark/Mission, a joint venture of Clark Construction Group Texas LP and Mission Constructors Inc., Houston
Steel fabricator: W&W Steel, Oklahoma City
Steel erector: Derr Steel Erection Co., Euless