Pittsburgh's 'airport of the future'
The sun sets on Tasso Katselas's Pittsburgh landside terminal
Pittsburgh International Airport’s Midfield Terminal looms high as the definitive airline “hub” in the minds of travelers of a certain age. It was to travel in the northeast what Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport was (and is) to travel in the southeast.
The precast concrete, steel and glass complex designed by Western Pennsylvania’s own Tasso Katselas opened on Oct. 1, 1992. An X-shaped airside concourse dominates the complex and is connected by underground train to a separate landside terminal defined by its three, soaring barrel vaults.
The Midfield Terminal stood as a symbol of both the Rust Belt’s strength — and of USAir’s might — and then, later, of the region’s decline alongside that of the airline whose sun once rose and set over the Steel City. US Airways, as USAir became in 1997, closed its Pittsburgh hub in 2004 in part over costs associated with building the midfield complex. The carrier became part of American Airlines in 2013.
Connecting through Pittsburgh in the late 1990s and early noughts, I was one of the travelers browsing the Air Mall and occasionally eating at what, to teenage me, was a worldly TGI Fridays. I enjoyed the coherence and ease of the airside concourse; connecting was a breeze, especially compared to less straightforward hub complexes in Chicago, Detroit and Washington, D.C.
That holistic feeling is about to change for good. Later in October, the Pittsburgh airport will open a new Gensler and Luis Vidal + Architects-designed terminal nestled into one of the U-shaped alleys of Katselas’s airside concourse.
The landside structure, barrel vaults and all, will close for good. Its future TBD.
Here I look back on Katselas’s opus on the rolling Western Pennsylvania landscape. A later post will look at Pittsburgh’s now complete new landside terminal (I visited it in 2024 when it was still very much under construction).
‘Airport of the future’
Pittsburgh’s “airport of the future,” as USAir declared on the cover of its inflight magazine, USAir Magazine, in August 1992, was built in response to the age old issue of “overcrowding and congestion,” according to a 1985 environmental assessment by operator the Allegheny County Department of Aviation.
The old Greater Pittsburgh terminal designed by Joseph Hoover, opened in 1952 and expanded several times was at capacity thanks to USAir’s rapidly expanding hub at the airport. With no room to expand, further passenger growth would lead to “continued inefficient and congested processing of passengers,” particularly in terms of public and concession space.
Enter Katselas’s 12,000-acre midfield complex, known as such for its location between the airport’s parallel runways.
Atlanta had already proved the sheer efficiency of complete separation of airside and landside functions at a hub, Katselas just improved on the idea with a more passenger-friendly airside layout for Pittsburgh.
“The new Pittsburgh International Airport terminal,” wrote USAir’s then Chairman and President Seth Schofield in that inflight magazine, “will offer air travelers the most pleasant experience in a connecting hub airport, and then some! This is because the new facility, the largest airport project completed in this country since Dallas-Fort Worth opened in 1974, features a design unique to airport architecture.”
That boastful swagger was not all public relations hyperbole. The complex was designed with an X-shaped concourse, rather than the linear approach of Atlanta’s Midfield Terminal (opened 1980), especially to facilitate the flight connections and busy peaks of an airline hub.
“The novel configuration means that passengers don’t have to leave the building or change levels, and the X is projected to trim taxi time to runways, saving aircraft millions of dollars worth of fuel and, presumably, reducing runway delays,” wrote Architecture Journal in August 1992.
More recently, Michael Wyetzner of Michielli + Wyetzner Architects used the layout of Beijing Daxing International Airport by Zaha Hadid Architects (opened 2019) to explain the passenger benefits of radial airport design in a video for Architectural Digest.
“What this hub-and-spoke concept means is that no gate is too far away from the center,” he said. “This concept is incredibly pedestrian friendly because it means you don’t have to walk all these great distances like you do at other airports.”
Daxing and Pittsburgh, despite being separated by 27 years and an ocean of architectural style, share more than just similar layouts. Linear skylights let in natural light and guide travelers through the concourses to the central core where they find soaring atriums, shops and restaurants.
Pittsburgh differs from Daxing in its complete separation of airside and landside functions connected via a roughly half-mile long underground people mover. Separation that was deliberate to maximize the efficiency of the hub.
Atlanta had already proved the sheer efficiency of complete separation of airside and landside functions at a hub, Katselas just improved on the idea with a more passenger-friendly airside layout for Pittsburgh.
Anthony Paletta wrote in Bloomberg CityLab in 2018 that Katselas’s design was upon opening “praised extensively for its circulatory innovations.”
That airside circulation, for all the changes coming to Pittsburgh, is not changing. What is is the “holistic” experience of Katselas’s complex as a whole.
A ‘holistic’ experience
“Tasso thought of the airport holistically as an experience,” said Gerard Damiani, an architect and an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon School of Architecture.
The design, Damiani explained, viewed the travel experience “episodically” — parking or the curbside drop off, check-in and bag drop, security, transit to the concourse, then the actual act of going to a gate and boarding a plane.
“Everything is about movement as a kind of theme,” he said. “The airport really syncopates the kind of experience of movement.”
“There’s something about it that you just know you’re in Pittsburgh. It’s part of the texture, the very particular design elements and atmosphere of this place.”
Katselas achieved that in precast concrete, steel and glass. After the soaring barrel vaults, the substantial use of concrete is immediately evident to anyone approaching the landside structure, whether from the parking lots or roadways. Its appearance is heavy with the steel canopies, and visible barrel vaults, more an accent than dominant feature.
Architectural Record in 1992 was not, for all its praise of the layout of Katselas’s complex, impressed by the terminal’s form.
“Midfield’s outward appearance is disappointingly like a conventional office building,” the magazine wrote. “Barrel-vault roofs mark primary public spaces, but these are overpowered by the complex’s sheer size. Steel canopies that cantilever 40 feet to cover dropoff ramps, while elegant, are only accents to the precast-concrete framing. The complex projects a public face of brisk efficiency rather than being an uplifting symbol, more in keeping with the expectations of today’s jaded air traveler.”
Ouch.
To be fair, the form of Pittsburgh’s midfield complex compares favorably to its mega-hub predecessors — notably Atlanta and Dallas-Fort Worth — that traded form for extreme function.
That said, the form of Pittsburgh’s terminal is less impressive next to the airport hub complexes that followed. Denver International Airport by Fentress Architects (opened 1995), Hong Kong International Airport by Norman Foster (opened 1998) or the McNamara Terminal at Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport by SmithGroup (opened 2002) are all examples of the light and airy designs that airports would adopt.
But, for the shortcomings of Katselas’s structure, something stands to be lost when the new, modern terminal opens in Pittsburgh — and it’s not just the snaking queues at the undersized TSA checkpoint or the former TGI Fridays (I highly recommend Primanti Bros today).
Brittany Reilly, a member of the Preservation Pittsburgh’s board and chair of the group’s modern committee (check out their excellent Instagram feed), described it as a something of a “vintage charm” for the 1990s, a decade from which the styles are back in fashion.
“There’s something about it that you just know you’re in Pittsburgh,” she said. “It’s part of the texture, the very particular design elements and atmosphere of this place.”
Nice! I was just visiting Cincinnati this weekend, so “managed decline of airports” and “hubs of a byegone era” are topics that have been on my mind. Unfortunately I never got to visit PGH in its heyday.