Future of Newark Airport Could Be Influenced By NJIT Student Designer

A recent NJIT graduate thinks Newark Liberty International Airport should be rebuilt as a community center with plenty of green space, autonomous shuttles, and better rail connections to New York City.

Architecture major Samantha Pires took second place for these ideas in a prestigious design competition. The concept she presented is known among architects as biophilia, which orgininated in the 1980s and means that humans are naturally comfortable when we and our town squares are one with the environment. Far Eastern airports are already largely designed this way, but Western airports are sprawling fenced-in campuses accessed by car, and located in suburbs or industrial outposts.

Pires grew up in nearby Kearny, N.J. and first flew at age 16 to Brazil, which began her interest in transportation architecture. She's since been to six other domestic airports and two more overseas. Her favorite is Singapore's Changi, from which she borrowed key ideas for a forest-like ambience in her Newark vision. She began documenting the ideas for a 2018 studio class with architecture professor Darius Sollohub in NJIT's Hillier College of Architecture and Design, and then expanded them for the contest sponsored by Denver-based Fentress Architects which drew several hundred other students on 110 teams. She chose to work alone and is the first NJIT winner of the contest that began in 2011.

Timber, not steel, would be the main construction element of Pires' visionary airport. Timber that is glued and laminated is as strong as steel and takes twice as long to burn, Sollohub noted.

Pires said her design influence is airport consultant John Kasarda and his theory of the aerotropolis, where an airport is the center -- not an outskirt -- of a metropolitan region. She also cited existing research from sources as varied as the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Regional Planning Association's Fourth Plan all the way to local building codes and landscaping elements. "These studies happened organically as I tried to design different pieces of the project... the thesis statement for my project is that I wanted to create an airport that was integrated with the city, benefited the existing community economically, and created new public spaces through future technologies and biophilic design."

Her ideas could take decades to implement, and a Fentress representative said the company was impressed by how she planned a system of execution, not just ideas in a vacuum. Pires acknowledged the challenges of accomplishing such change and said the most viable short-term improvement is to use autonomous vehicles to replace the existing light-rail connection between the airport and the standard Northeast Corridor train. Autonomous vehicles can take passengers and cargo directly to the right locations, rather than forced gatherings at terminal stops. Longer-term, she'd also like to see the acquisition and demolition of the Anheuser-Busch brewery for additional airport space, and the construction of H-shaped terminals connected to a central main building.

The Port Authority is aware of the long-term strategy and has not decided whether to implement it. "This kind of airport represents the future," Sollohub predicted.

Pires said if she had more time for the competition, then she would have liked to put more work into the airport's overal urban scheme. "I struggled to understand how to integrate the economic benefits of an aerotropolis in a way that wouldn't gentrify or change the identity of the existing neighborhoods. I think more research on these kind of amenities that would benefit and protect those communities would help support my project's stance on trying to create an airport that is "In Newark, and for Newark'," she said.

Pires now works at Bjarke Ingels Group in Brooklyn. She noted some lessons learned: "I think the main lesson for me in this experience was to speak up and take full advantage of the resources around you. There were lofty and blue-sky design ideas that I was intent on including in this very complex design prompt. A lot of the experts who reviewed my project were willing to listen to these ideas and help me preserve them while still being serious and realistic," she said. "I expected to be shot down a lot of times, but instead found that they were just excited and motivated to help me achieve these things as I was, as long as I made an effort to ask."

Sollohub's praise for the new generation of architects is bright. "I take a very positive view of millennials. There are other colleauges that they think they're going to destroy the world," he joked. Millennials as compared to older designers are practical-minded, civic-focused, tend to be collaborative, and have overwhelming digital aptitude, he noted. As for Pires, he said, "She's probably the most accomplished, talented student I've had in my 25 years."