HOK has been selected to lead the design for a single consolidated terminal at St. Louis Lambert International Airport.
Lambert Director Rhonda Hamm-Niebruegge announced the St. Louis-based global design, architecture, engineering and planning firm won the bid at Thursday’s Airport Commission meeting. She said it was a tough decision to pick one group out of those that submitted plans, adding that many of the presentations were high quality.
“You look at a lot of different things,” Hamm-Niebruegge said. “It’s the airports that they’ve worked on in the past that are the same type of magnitude, the overall team that they put together, their design concepts, minority participation.”
HOK and the airport will spend the next few months negotiating a contract before the firm launches into the design process, which could take about 18 months, Hamm-Niebruegge said.
Construction on the new terminal cannot start until airlines at the airport authorize it, which won’t happen until the new terminal is almost entirely designed, she added. But the airport will continue working on other projects that will help enable consolidation to happen more quickly, Hamm-Niebruegge said.
“There’s a lot of moving pieces, and people are going to be seeing a lot of that [construction] starting this year, but it’s not the terminal construction they’re going to start seeing this year,” she said.
Lambert’s previously approved master plan calls for the consolidation of the airport's existing two terminals into a single one that could have up to 62 gates for narrow-body jets. The new single terminal would branch out of the existing site of Terminal 1.
“That is the footprint of what is in our master plan, so they have to follow that,” Hamm-Niebruegge said. “It’s everything else that really becomes all of these design features.”
As a firm, HOK has experience with designing successful airports. It was behind LaGuardia Airport’s new Terminal B in New York, which has garnered recognition as one of the world’s best new airport terminals.
"Our entire team is excited and honored to be invited to help Lambert achieve its incredible goal of a new, consolidated terminal," said Eli Hoisington, HOK's St. Louis design principal and co-CEO, in a statement. "As it touches both history and home, this project has special meaning to us: both as St. Louisans and as leaders in the global aviation market. We can't wait to get started."
Hamm-Niebruegge said she is excited to have an architect selected and begin moving forward in the process of terminal consolidation, which will still take years to complete. She explained the new terminal will open in phases as well with the western portion being built and opened first, then the eastern portion.
“Your first phase would be scheduled to open the end of 2028 and then the end of 2031, beginning of 2032, where the whole terminal would be completed,” Hamm-Niebruegge said.
