Airport Experience® News - Retail Innovation Issue 2024

LATEST BUZZ

Above: Two decades after being dehubbed by the now defunct US Airways, Pittsburgh International Airport is right-sizing and modernizing for the future. Right: The new terminal at PIT will offer airside-connected outdoor terraces will help travelers embrace nature during their time at the airport.

and destination, and only 5% connecting,” he adds. Creating a new landside terminal facility while renovating the airside terminal and surrounding ground transportation facilities “is about sweating all of our assets,” says Hoback. “How do we convert our facilities from this major hub into an origin and destination airport that was built for Pittsburgh, and by Pittsburgh?” After years of conversations around master planning, the $1.57-billion project broke ground in 2021 and is expected to be complete by 2025, says Hoback. Funded by a variety of sources including multiple municipal bonds, passenger facility charges and money granted by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the PIT Transformed project reduces the airport’s gates from 70 to 55 while expanding its main security checkpoint area, reducing transportation time from curbside to airside gate, increasing covered parking and building a new ground transportation center, as well as adding a wide portfolio of new concessions and retail concepts.

and wanted them to truly understand what we’re all about,” says Hoback. “Out of that process came a theme of three things that we call NATECO, which stands for nature, technology and community.” PIT’s new facilities feature not only local materials like Pittsburgh steel but visual references to the region at large. “You can see some of it in the renderings – the rolling hills of the Western Pennsylvania region, identified through roof design, [and] the wood-like ceiling and tree columns that we have in the new terminal,” says Hoback, adding that the terminal’s new airside

Pittsburgh Immersion Designed in collaboration with Gensler, HDR, luis vidal + architects (who provided designs for the new terminal spaces), Michael Baker International (who designed the multi-modal parking complex) and built by PJ Dick/Hunt and Turner Construction , PIT’s new facilities are being constructed with the city of Pittsburgh in mind, says Hoback. “Early on in the process, we took the whole design team down to Pittsburgh. We really immersed them in the culture of Pittsburgh

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AX NEWS SEPTEMBER 2024