Virgin's Airport Terminal of the Future: Slick, Recycled, and Featuring Food You Want to Eat
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By Ariel Schwartz on April 7, 2011
SFO Terminal 2
The Ticketing Area
The Recompose Zone
Hydration Stations
Local Food
The Lounge Area
The Lounge Area
The Bathrooms
Behind the Scenes
Airport terminals are inherently depressing places--characterless zones filled with people frantically eating the most convenient food option (often a suspicious rendition of Chinese or Mexican food) and scrambling to get to their gates on time. Never mind if the airport is LEED certified or heavy on recycled elements; passengers just want comfort. And that's exactly what San Francisco International Airport's new Terminal 2, home to Virgin America and American Airlines, intends to do--all while subtly encouraging patrons to ditch their water bottles, eat local food, and compost it afterward (and then get on a plane that drastically increase their carbon footprint).
The $383 million, Gensler-designed terminal, which is, by the way, aiming for LEED Platinum status, avoids giving passengers giant headaches right off the bat, with mood lighting in the ticketing area (35% more efficient than California Energy Codes require), plentiful natural daylight (meaning less energy use overall), and wood paneling at the check-in area.
After escaping the security line (The TSA cannot be defeated, even by Richard Branson), travelers are greeted with a "Recompose Zone," which is basically just an open space with pieces of furniture scattered throughout. "It's unexpected furniture for a terminal. It's more like a hotel," says Melissa Mizell, a senior designer at Gensler.
Some passengers just don't think about the fairly obvious fact that they can fill up their water bottles with clean tap water in the bathroom or in water fountains, which saves them from asking for ridiculously tiny bottles of water every 15 minutes on their flight. For those people, T2 features more inviting water filling stations. It's just a case of making the obvious even more obvious: yes, water is available for free here. Vendors are also being asked to serve bottled water only in compostable containers.
SFO Terminal 2: It's almost like eating in a hipster San Francisco neighborhood. We're serious--75% of all eateries and retailers in the terminal are local. We spotted some favorites while touring the terminal, including Burger Joint and Andalu. There is no vomit-inducing fast food here; vendors are all being asked to use organic and local ingredients, cage-free eggs, non-hydrogenated oils, and Fair Trade coffee.
Once passengers have finished eating, they will be encouraged to compost their leftovers, both with traditional stand-alone bins and with built-in recycling and composting stations (though these weren't quite ready when we visited the site).
Instead of forcing passengers to sit packed together like cattle, nervously eying their battery bars as they use their devices, Terminal 2 offers desk spaces with abundant outlets scattered throughout the gate area.
There is also plenty of comfortable seating.
Believe it or not, Terminal 2's bathrooms are fairly inviting, featuring lots of open space. The bathrooms also feature Dyson Airblade Hand Dryers, which scrape water off hands in just 12 seconds (using up to 80% less energy than standard hand dryers), compared to the standard 43 seconds. Eventually, the bathrooms might even use greywater in their toilets (translation: recycled water that has already been used in other places, like the bathroom sink).
Many of the energy and material-saving features of the terminal are behind the scenes, so you will never be able to give Virgin/Gensler credit for them unless we point them out. These include a ventilation system that brings cool air into the terminal at waist-level while pushing warm air upwards (a feature that slashes 20% off the energy use compared to traditional systems), the use of Forest Stewardship Council-certified wood, plumbing fixtures that are 40% more efficient than standard fixtures, and lots of recycled materials (much of the new terminal has been recycled from the old Terminal 2).
An efficient, pleasant, airport terminal is exciting, of course, but only to an extent. There's still the larger problem of increasing efficiency in the heart of the airline business: the actual planes. Until they figure out how to use significantly less ultra-expensive fuel, airlines are doomed in the long-run, no matter how many local food eateries they provide in their terminals. SFO's Terminal 2 is at least a move in the right direction, though.
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