A San Diego Box
A California terminal that feels San Diego.
What is a California airport? To me, it’s airy. Light filled. A structure that is sophisticated but does not take itself too seriously.
To paraphrase Ken’s lighthearted purpose in the 2023 film Barbie, its job is airport.
If you asked me to name the quintessential California airport I would probably say the Long Beach Airport or Palm Springs International Airport — though one could say those are quintessentially Southern California airports. Northern California’s cooler climates require more substantial edifices. Both Long Beach and Palm Springs blend indoor and outdoor elements in a way that travelers enjoy, at least on non-rainy or blisteringly hot days.
This is the question faced by the team at Gensler when they set about designing the new Terminal 1 at San Diego International Airport. From the jump, the airport was also clear what they did not want: “No dolphins, no whales, [and] surf culture is important but it is not the definition of what San Diego is,” Terence Young, a principal in Gensler’s Los Angeles office who worked on the project, said during a recent tour.
The result that opened in October is, undoubtedly, a California terminal. It may not literally be outdoors but it does reflect a Southern California ethos with light-filled, column-free spaces and an ease that San Diego perfected in the Terminal 2 West expansion by HNTB and Tucker Sadler Architects that opened in 2013.
The San Diego airport, I admit, is one of my favorites. Having flown through Terminal 2 West numerous times, I appreciate its convenience and airy spaces. I can make it from curbside through security, if I am not checking a bag, in under 10 minutes — and often much faster. The design lacks pretension and does not show off but it pleasantly embodies San Diego, from local retailers to Southern California appropriate art.
Where else can travelers “swim” to their gates?
The new Terminal 1 gave San Diego the opportunity to repeat those successes and improve upon them. The premise was simple: replace the airport’s oldest terminal, the aged and cramped, if wonderfully brutalist, Terminal 1 — RIP concrete waffle — by Paderewski Dean & Associates that opened in 1967, with a modern structure. Out were two cramped, circular satellites each with their own TSA checkpoint that even main tenant Southwest Airlines was done with, and in was a single, linear concourse off a central checkpoint and sprinkled with gate “neighborhoods,” as Young described them, and other amenities.
“If you start with a clean diagram, a simple box — there’s nothing wrong with that — then how do you make a simple box … become, not a container, but a way to hold and tell a story,” he said.
