Woods Bagot Brings ‘Great Australian Light’ to Our Newest Airport

As Western Sydney International (Nancy-Bird Walton) Airport gears up for takeoff, the final touches on its passenger terminal are being added. It is the first greenfield international airport built in Australia since Melbourne’s Tullamarine was completed in 1970, and Woods Bagot project director Sarah Kay tells The Urban Developer that “it’s the unicorn of airports”. “There’s no existing constraints that you have to work around… when you’re working in an existing airport, even if it’s a new terminal, you’ve got an idea of what you’re designing for. So it does make it quite a different starting point,” Kay says. Woods Bagot picked up detailed design for the project, after concept work was done by COX Architecture and Zaha Hadid Architects. The brief involved detailing the structural form into a highly-functional asset that worked for operators and customers. The competing requirements of security and border control, aviation services, and 10 million annual passengers all needed to fit within the design. “There are an enormous number of stakeholders involved in an airport project. There’s retail operations, customer experience, the airlines,” Kay says. “There’s so many different people really trying to squeeze everything that they can out of the orange. And it’s a very technical building. ▲ Cargo flights are planned to begin in July, and passenger services in October 2026. All images: Trevor Mein “It’s a reasonably simple box with very, very complex insides.” Modularity key to design “The thing that’s different about airports to any other project typology, except maybe train stations, is that it’s 100,000sq m—a Barangaroo tower of floor space—with not a single square metre of repetition,” Kay says. “Every single part of it is filled with a really highly functional requirement that has co-dependence on the next functional requirement. So it’s a really complex puzzle.” The single-runway, single-terminal airport is masterplanned to expand for a second runway in the 2050s, and eventually to two terminals and four runways. Woods Bagot has innovated when expanding existing airports, including the Midfield Satellite Concourse at LAX. That building was constructed off-site in nine segments, then trucked over the runways and assembled during the night. But WSIA was designed with modularity in mind from the start, both in its internal form and potential future expansion. Woods Bagot project design leader Neil Hill tells The Urban Developer that the architectural team wanted to “sweat the asset”. “We started, right from the onset, by using a dimensional grid that we know that materials and elements that go into the terminal can work with. So facade systems can go in efficiently, cladding systems. “It turns out that 9m by 9m, and various versions of that grid in different directions, is a good grid to work with. “So some of the things we did was to identify the really important spaces where you don’t want columns in your way. The check-in, for example, we made sure that we set up the geometry—with the engineering team at Arup in particular—to be able to get those free-spanned areas. ▲ A climate-responsive facade maximises both light and thermal efficiency. “In the retail environment, we knew that the full answers aren’t really known at this point in time in terms of the type of retailer, so we just got to make a space that can adapt to all sorts of different uses.” A 5km baggage conveyor system, among other services, was located in a mezzanine floor under the terminal. “It’s a really tech-y building down below… there’s all these robots that carry bags around.” Hill says. “But it’s quite comfortable and relaxed, and it feels like a joy to use, whereas a lot of terminals these days aren’t, because they’re just so squeezed.” ▲ The terminal should not feel make passengers feel rushed or cramped, the Woods Bagot team said. Following the light Hill says, beyond functionality, the airport needs “to make a splash out there in the international market”. “We’re essentially presenting a new front door to Australia. And so we’re using the terminal architecture as one part of that experience,” he says. Pedestrian traffic flows in an airport are rigid, but Woods Bagot worked to make paths feel intuitive rather than restrictive. Kay said that “there are certain lines that you have to walk in, but humans know when they’re convoluted and not straight and simple and direct”. ▲ The feature ceiling and columns should invoke the sense of a grove of eucalypts, according to the design team. “An IKEA store is not a good experience, because you know you’ve been taken in a convoluted route. So it has to be well-planned and it has to make logical sense in terms of a sequence of experiences. You can’t maneuver people where they don’t naturally want to go.” The team emphasised the “Great Australian Light” as a guiding element, using a feature ceiling designed to emulate a sun-dappled grove of eucalypts. “There’s also an incredibly strong ability for light to act as a way finding mechanism… you’ll notice when you’re walking through the airport that you can always see to the outside in the direction that you’re heading,” Kay says. “We changed the roof line and the mullions on the windows from their original concept, to make sure that you had that view line all the way through… so that you’re actually drawn into the Arrivals lounge by natural light, not by signage. You’re always able to navigate where you are in the terminal.” ▲ Sightlines throughout the building are intended to help passengers navigate instinctively. Hill said that materiality was pushed into service “looking for flow lines in the way people move through spaces which are comfortable”. “You’re trying to proportion the spaces. We managed to convince the contractor and the client, bringing natural light in and also then using surfaces and color and texture. Each sandstone block in the building was individually selected for its placement. “It’s a very different type of sandstone than you would see in the eastern CBD, in the banks and the museums, in corporate lobbies,” Hill says. “We deliberately went for a very textured, rich series of panels… then what we did is we ran these horizontal datums around the whole terminal to give you that sedimentary feel. ▲ Light, colour and texture were carefully designed to welcome passengers. “By bringing in that void and skylight and natural light, we deliberately set it up so it washes the whole sandstone wall, and it becomes the draw card after a long flight, picking your bag up in the reclaim hall.” Kay says that the resulting atmosphere of comfort and calm generated by the design means the Arrivals lounge “is my favorite co-working space in the whole of Sydney”. “The sun streams through the windows. The colors are really warm and beautiful,” Kay says. “It’s a cozy color palette within a really big space. And so it humanises it a lot.”

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