Case study — Vienna Airport Terminal 2
€62M
transformation of Austria's oldest terminal — designed, coordinated, and delivered under live airport operations
02 — The magnitude of the brief
Terminal 2 had not been operationally updated since the early 1960s. By the time Forum Architekten won the competition, it was processing international passengers through a security infrastructure, border control system, and passenger flow logic that belonged to a different era of aviation. The mandate was total: renew every interior surface, every structural interface, every technical system, every passenger touchpoint — from the approach road to the departure gate — without taking the terminal offline for a single day.
Four conditions that made this project singular
Live operations throughout
Construction ran 2017–2021 across active airport operations. Every phase required isolation protocols, phasing plans, and coordination with Flughafen Wien AG's operational teams. No terminal closure. No passenger disruption.
Multi-security zone complexity
The terminal spans Schengen, Non-Schengen, airside, landside, customs, and staff-only zones — each with distinct structural, material, and systems requirements, all interfacing within a single building envelope.
Heritage preservation mandate
Terminal 2's 1955 architecture — including its original roof structure — required retention and restoration within modern building codes. Premium Austrian cultural identity had to read through every material decision.
Pandemic construction
The project ran through the full COVID-19 period. Delivered on schedule and on budget despite short-time working, supply chain disruption, and unprecedented operational uncertainty at the client site.
Five passenger zones — each a distinct design problem
Access hall — boarding pass control
The first physical touchpoint for departing passengers. Central boarding pass control integrated directly into the access hall from the driveway — security filtering before passengers enter the terminal body.
Security hall (SIKO Halle) — 14 new lanes
The original departure hall transformed into a centralized 14-lane security checkpoint. The 1955 roof structure was retained and renovated. Sitznische seating niches, material palette, and lighting designed to millimetre precision.
Service counters — transactional touchpoints
Security service counters, border control, and Easy Service desks — each embedding classified security hardware (FB4 bulletproof steel, MACH/OCR systems, silent alarms) behind a premium FunderMax aesthetic.
Passenger facilities — toilets, niches, accessibility
Full WC group redesign to contemporary accessibility standards: PAX feedback terminals, Laufen PRO A accessible basins, PRM/Family units with emergency call systems, fold-out changing tables, and Silestone partitions.
Baggage claim hall — arrivals infrastructure
New arrivals baggage area with 4 carousels, numbered wayfinding, redefined Schengen/Non-Schengen borders, and a redesigned landside passage. Barrisol light ceiling system and structural ribbed ceiling detailed at 1:50.
What made this a design operations problem, not just a design problem
Every decision had a dual constraint: it had to satisfy the 5-star international airport standard, and it had to be constructible in sequence, in phases, in a live operational environment, with zero tolerance for error. The execution drawings — issued to contractors working around active security perimeters — had to be exactly right. There was no room for interpretation on site.
03 — My role across the full lifecycle
My engagement on Vienna Airport Terminal 2 was not a phase or a package — it was the full lifecycle from survey to handover. I joined at the very beginning: before any design could proceed, someone had to establish the ground truth. That was the as-built ArchiCAD model — a complete 3D reconstruction of the existing terminal. Everything that followed was built on that foundation.
Consortium
Full lifecycle — what I owned
What I was responsible for within the terminal
Passenger flow architecture
Access hall, security hall, post-security retail corridor, gate routes to B, C, D gates
Transactional touchpoints
Service counters, border control desks, Easy Service, check-in renewal
Passenger facilities
WC groups (Damen, Herren, PRM/FAM), Sitznische seating niches, wayfinding
Technical infrastructure
Security systems integration, BIM coordination, escape staircase design, hollow-floor cabling
Visual language system
Golden Heritage identity: material codes, color palette, finishing specifications
Brand identity input
Guideline participation across the full T2 + Pier East scope including Vienna Lounge
My background as a practicing architect on major construction sites — managing procurement, subcontractor coordination, and technical documentation — meant I could operate at the intersection of conceptual design and construction precision without losing either. On Vienna Airport, those two modes were never separable.
04 — The passenger journey I designed
The passenger journey through Terminal 2 is a designed system — not a sequence of rooms, but a choreography of flow, decision, and threshold. From the moment a passenger leaves their vehicle to the moment they reach their gate, every touchpoint was specified: materials, dimensions, embedded systems, lighting, accessibility provisions, and wayfinding logic. Click any zone to inspect the design decisions.
05 — Technical rigor and BIM coordination
Airport architecture operates at a level of technical density that most building types never approach. Every element serves multiple masters: aesthetics, security classification, fire code, structural load, mechanical integration, accessibility compliance. The execution drawings I produced were the interface between all of those constraints — and they had to be right before the contractor showed up on site.
BIM and drawing production
Structural and systems integration
Material specification
Accessibility and compliance
Security infrastructure — what sits behind the aesthetic
Escape infrastructure
The Lobmeyr chandeliers — heritage as infrastructure
The departures hall received Lobmeyr baroque chandeliers based on the Schloss Hof design — originally created for Prince Eugene of Savoy's summer residence, which sits 12km from the airport. Each fixture stands over 3 metres tall with 36 candles, positioned outside the central security check for non-Schengen flights. Specifying a 300-year-old chandelier design for an international airport security zone is not a furniture decision — it is a cultural positioning statement executed in glass and brass.
06 — What was delivered
Vienna Airport Terminal 2 reopened on 29 March 2022. The oldest terminal building in Austria opened as a 5-star international facility with new security infrastructure, a 2,400 m² Vienna Lounge, and an interior that reads as an architectural statement about Austrian cultural identity. The reopening was a national event attended by the Mayor of Vienna and the Governor of Lower Austria.
State-level inauguration — 23 March 2022
What was delivered — scope summary
07 — What infrastructure teaches you
The lessons from Vienna Airport Terminal 2 are not primarily about aesthetics or user experience. They are about what happens when design decisions have structural, legal, and safety consequences — when a misread dimension on an execution drawing becomes a contractor problem on a live airport site, and when phasing decisions affect the security of thousands of passengers daily.
The as-built model is not documentation — it is the design foundation
Every subsequent decision on this project was only as reliable as the 3D as-built model established in phase one. On a 1955 building, archive drawings are incomplete, inaccurate, or absent. The BIM survey was not preparatory work — it was the most critical design act of the entire project.
Security integration is an invisible design problem — and the hardest one
The FB4 ballistic steel, the concealed alarms, the tapestry doors, the OCR readers — none of these are visible to a passenger. Designing something that must perform at maximum specification while appearing to be ordinary furniture is a specific and demanding discipline that has no equivalent in commercial UX.
Live-environment phasing is a design skill, not a logistics skill
Managing construction within a live airport meant every phase boundary — temporary walls, access routes, security zone separations — was itself a design problem. The construction sequence had to be legible to both the building contractor and the airport security team simultaneously.
Heritage and modernization are not opposites
The Lobmeyr chandeliers and the FB4 security counters occupy the same building. The 1955 roof structure and the Zumtobel bioactive lighting system are in the same room. The skill is not choosing between heritage and function — it is specifying each so precisely that neither compromises the other.
Multi-stakeholder coordination at this scale changes how you communicate
Flughafen Wien AG, Forum Architekten, Moser Architects, Zentraplan, multiple specialist contractors, security authorities — each with different technical languages and different risk thresholds. Learning to communicate the same design decision six different ways, without losing precision, is a professional capability that infrastructure projects build and consumer product work rarely demands.
HP Smart Digitization
Innovation & Discovery
Cobria
Enterprise Authority
Vienna Airport
Physical Systems Anchor
Capabilities demonstrated