Boston Logan’s new terminal looks like a hot red race car

As you trudge your way to the airport this Thanksgiving, you can be thankful for at least one thing: the U.S.’s major airports are getting better—albeit some more quickly than others. LaGuardia Airport, once the laughingstock of New York, is actually nice now, thanks to a slew of ongoing recent upgrades. LAX and JFK, two more often-derided locales, are undergoing $14.3 billion and $19 billion upgrades, respectively, with work continuing through about 2030. Chicago’s O’Hare is undergoing an $8.5 billion revamp, known as O’Hare 21, set to wrap up around 2028.

Even Boston’s Logan, an often dreary place consistently ranked as one of the worst airports for customer satisfaction (it came in fifth from last in J.D. Power’s 2023 North America Airport Satisfaction Study), is making vast improvements as part of a $2 billion plan called Logan Forward. The most striking is undoubtedly its recently completed modernization and addition to its Terminal E, which hosts most of the airport’s international flights.

Led by AECOM and Spanish firm Luis Vidal + Architects, it looks more like a fire-engine-red sports car than an airport terminal. Its sleek, rounded look is partly inspired by the aerodynamics of airplanes, but it largely grew out of strict practical concerns. Those included a very narrow site, the need to block airport sound for the nearby neighborhood (which meant the building needed to be at least 60 feet tall in its middle section), and a desire to pull in indirect natural light via bending, north-facing skylights. Another core issue, noted the team, was designing a dramatic, clutter-free customer experience in which passengers enter through compressed check-in and security areas only to arrive at a spacious great hall that has a wow factor.

“We wanted to generate a space where passengers felt free, and where they could make their own decisions,” says Vidal. “With a glimpse, the passenger can understand the building entirely. That removes a lot of anxiety.”

The bold color, meanwhile, emerged from Vidal’s notion of capturing what he called “Boston Red,” present in the city’s dominant red brick buildings, its fall foliage, summer sunsets, the school colors of universities like Harvard, Boston College, and Boston University, and even in the logo of the Boston Red Sox. (Vidal, whose two sons live in Boston, has an apartment in the city.)

“When we first talked about red, we all went ‘no way,’” notes AECOM principal Terry Rookard. But it all came together and it all made sense. At the end of the day, it is so brilliant and strong and inspiring.” That red surface is actually painted with prismatic paint, so it shifts between red, orange, and other hues over the course of the day, as the light changes. (The team said this was the first time prismatic paint had been used on an airport building.)

And while it’s hard to imagine, given their energy demands and proximity to planes’ toxic fumes, the project—like many new airport buildings today—is surprisingly sustainable. Like at LaGuardia,  whose terminal B was the first airport project in the world to achieve LEED Gold certification,  Logan’s new terminal is pursuing LEED Gold certification as well. The terminal pulls in huge amounts of natural light and employs photovoltaic glass (essentially, solar panels embedded in the glass itself), electrochromic glass (which changes tint according to sun levels), and a displacement ventilation system that only cools the lowest levels of the terminal, pulling the hot air above outside.

While not yet a household name in the U.S., Vidal has designed airports around the world, including terminals at London Heathrow and Barcelona El Prat and a new mass timber structure at Pittsburgh International Airport. He notes that as airports continue to expand and improve, future technologies are going to revolutionize burdensome experiences like security screening and baggage control. Yet, it’s still the customized design of the elements—light, air, surface, space—that will set apart the best of these spaces. “They’re all completely different,” he says. “There’s no way of repeating an airport.”