Istanbul's Big Airport

When does a terminal get too big?

Upon disembarking from a recent Turkish Airlines flight at IGA Istanbul Airport, I fired up my Garmin. No, I wasn’t about to do the 100-yard dash to catch my connecting flight. Rather, I wanted to put complaints about the size of the terminal to the test.

“It’s far bigger and more cumbersome to get around” than needed, said FlightRadar24 contributor and frequent traveler Gabe Leigh in a recent TikTok post on his least favorite European airports.

“The enormous ceilings are kind of impressive but they’re certainly not calming. [And] the signage is not always sufficient,” he added.

Is the Istanbul Airport too big? And what is too big for an airport? I hit go on my Garmin.

Walking through the main terminal of IGA Istanbul Airport recently.

The Istanbul Airport opened in 2019, replacing the smaller, land-locked Atatürk Airport. The terminal was designed by a consortium including Grimshaw Architects, Scott Brownrigg, Nordic Office of Architecture, and Haptic Architects, with a brief that called for the “world’s largest terminal.” The initial design capacity was for 80 million passengers with expansion to 120 million possible, according to Scott Brownrigg.

And the project had national importance. One of the many mega-projects championed by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, it was designed as a symbol of Turkey’s rise and the showpiece hub for national carrier, Turkish Airlines.

Given this background, it’s no surprise that the Istanbul Airport took the idea of the airport under the “big roof” and raised it to another level. That was the point.

The terminal exterior at the Istanbul Airport.

One thing I’ve learned from all my travels and all the airports that I’ve passed through, is that you can design and build a big, but also efficient, terminal.

As Michael Wyetzner of Michielli + Wyetzner Architects put it in a recent Architectural Digest video:

“The nature of air travel now means you’re going to spend more time in the airport than you really want to. So you might as well be in as nice a building as you can be in. But, no matter how nice that building is, you still want the airport to run efficiently and you don’t want to spend more time than you have to. There has to be a sweet spot between the two and that is the nature of good airport design today.”