Aga Khan Award for Architecture winner – Hajj Terminal – Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

From the Wired Science Blog …

Now that I’m sensitized to Hajj stories, I learned a new fact today from Businessweek: King Abdul Aziz International Airport in Saudi Arabia has a dedicated terminal used only during the six weeks of the Hajj. Check out the amenities:

The original design was inspired by traditional pilgrims’ tents used in the desert, and visitors can cook at open-pit fires while waiting in the terminal. The translucent “fabric” of the tents (actually a Teflon-coated fiberglass membrane) allows natural ventilation and soft lighting.

Here’s more on it—turns out it was an Aga Khan Award for Architecture winner for the big-shot firm Skidmore Owings and Merrill in 1982, says ArchNet:

Roofed by a fabric tension structure that covers more area (40.5 hectares) than any roof in the world, the terminal provides toilets, shops, benches and banking facilities for the pilgrims. Twenty-one tent units, each 45 metres square, form a single module. The terminal is comprised of 10 such modules: two identical five-module sections separated by a landscaped mall. Thus, the two large terminal units each comprise a total of 105 tents. The tents are hooked to steel rings hung from suspension cables which are draped from single pylons in the interior of the module, from ladder-like double pylons at the module edges and from four-pylon towers at the corners. The enclosed and air conditioned arrival buildings are located under the tents along the outside edge of the terminal units parallel to the aircraft aprons.

Wired Science