Airport Experience® News - ACDBE 2023

L ATES T BUZ Z

Mann and his team decided that a major overhaul of the airport’s infrastructure was needed to stay current. “We started with necessities,” said Mann, “and then as we started digging into what this could look like, we thought, ‘Well, we really need to have state-of-the-art facilities.’” In 2018, SDF drafted the team at architecture firm Alliiance , which worked with SDF on the 2015/2016 upgrades, to oversee a large-scale redesign of the airport’s passenger terminal areas. The assignment also called for the development of a more authentic Louisville experience for travelers passing through. “A lot of airports are very sterile — you can’t tell where you are and it’s very bland, and in some ways that’s what Louisville was,” says Alliiance Principal

Eric Peterson of the redesign process. “The Louisville mayor [then Greg Fischer] made a strong point that we should aim to make the Louisville airport more memorable. “We felt that having different voices represented was key to the project, so we held several facilitated workshops, where we had members of the community, representatives from the mayor’s office, and representatives from the airport board help us identify all these different threads that make Louisville such a rich place,” Peterson says. In Louisville’s case, the Ohio River, Kentucky Derby-related hospitality, and a multitude of bourbon distilleries provide good fodder for creating a sense of place. Architects also drew on the city’s industrial legacy as a center of manufacturing for the likes of the Ford Motor Company, Hillerich & Bradsby Sporting Goods (home to the Louisville Slugger baseball bat), General Electric and a majority of the world’s disco balls via maker Omega Products .

“This element of ‘duality’ came up,” explains Peterson. “We had many conversations about how we’re not really the South, we’re not really the Midwest. We are kind of in the South, we are kind of the Midwest,” he said. “We’re kind of a big city, but we’re not really a big city. We’re kind of a small town, but we’re not a small town. These conversations carried through what kind of story we wanted to focus on. “The goal is not to do something that’s Disneyland-esque or over the top,” adds Peterson. “A lot of times, when people talk about a ‘sense of place’ in airports, there’s one singular iconic gesture. We are trying to go for something that would be more authentic, wouldn’t change too much with trends, and could be interpreted architecturally and overtly in their communications.” Alliiance’s workshops yielded SDF the phrase “Distilling Great Experiences” as their North Star, which the team applied to both the interior design concepts using locally significant materials as well as the installation of elements like iconic

Below: SDF’s security checkpoint upgrade and

expansion includes high-tech innovations like electrochromic glass panels that work in tandem with the airport’s geothermal system

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