Pittsburgh's Post-Hub Future
How Pittsburgh is reinventing its midfield terminal
Pittsburgh International Airport’s midfield terminal complex, to a young Edward, was the definition of the modern air hub. The Air Mall at the concourses’ node with a very worldly TGI Fridays. The automated train. The hustle and bustle of USAir (later US Airways) fliers connecting to Indianapolis or Norfolk or Syracuse.
It was the future of air travel circa 1992.
But that future was not to be. A struggling US Airways closed its hub in 2004 after a cost dispute with the airport, and the Tasso Katselas-designed midfield terminal became a mausoleum to a bygone era of U.S. airline expansion, walled-off concourses and all.
Enter Christina Cassotis. She took over as CEO of Pittsburgh International Airport in 2015 after, as many relate, telling the Allegheny County Airport Authority board that the airport’s days as a hub were over. Two years later, she unveiled a plan to remake the hub.
That plan replaced the separate landside terminal (check in and baggage claim) terminal and airside concourses (the gates and planes), a split that defines modern hub airports (thanks Atlanta), and replaced it with a new single landside-airside complex. Notably, it kept Katselas’ X-shaped concourses with the addition of a new, three-level terminal building designed by Gensler in association with Luis Vidal + Architects that rises above it all between the existing concourses C and D.
The entire plan is a refreshing airport take on how airports adapt to the consolidation of airline hubs. Cincinnati1, Cleveland, Memphis, Milwaukee, and St. Louis airports have all lost hubs since 2000 and, at all of those airports, the response has been to either wall off or demolish the excess terminal space.
