Case study - A new terminal built around an airport that could not close

Building inside a live airport

A terminal project on a greenfield site is a design problem. A terminal project on an operating airport is a sequencing problem that happens to involve design.

Every phase had to leave a functioning passenger route, a functioning airside boundary and a functioning security envelope behind it. That is not a constraint you apply at the end — it determines where the structure can go, which walls can come down in which order, and how the MEP risers are arranged so that the temporary condition is as buildable as the final one.

What a design manager actually does here

The architecture and the engineering were not separate deliverables that met at the end. Across the demolition, alteration and new-build scopes, the work was to keep the architectural, structural and MEP packages telling the same story — and to catch it early when they stopped.

Related infrastructure work

The airport ran alongside a set of long-running technical lead appointments across the Western and Northern Cape, all with the same character: existing infrastructure, changing plant requirements, and a design that had to keep absorbing them.

Transnet’s Tippler 3 iron ore facility at Saldanha (USD 7m) and the Ystervark substation building. Freight rail power upgrades across the Juno, Helios, Aries and Garona substations. Control and O&M buildings for the Excelsior, Kangnas and Perdekraal East wind farms.

Several of these were appointments taken over mid-project — arriving at a design already in progress, working out what it was actually committed to, and carrying it to approval.