Having been in Riyadh for some time now, I have has to visit King Khaleed Riyadh international airport on several occasions.
Generally, The airports here in Saudi are, like airports all over the world; soulless, cold and uninviting. However, Riyadh Airport is different. This airport has a soul.
Aesthetically, it is wonderful. Columns reach up to the ornate vaulted roof reminiscent of an English church roof. The columns are designed to look like the trunks of palm trees and the vaulted roof which stretches majestically overhead evokes of palm tree branches. In addition the roof is constructed in a layered way at different levels and so it allows warming sunlight to penetrate inside. This make the airport feel light and airy.
Internally, expensive natural stone and marble adorns every surface so that the interior feels plush, warm and inviting.
In the middle of the departure lounge is an atrium than reaches 30 metres into the sky. The focal point is an inside fountain which spews water 20 metres high. Surrounding the fountain are waterfalls and smaller water features. The combined effect is that no matter where you are, you can hear the calming sound of trickling water.
Even more impressive is the veritable orchard of trees planted around the atrium. Indeed the entire airport is planted with trees, shrubs, plants and flowers throughout which can almost fool you into thinking you are in the middle of a country park.
In short therefore, Riyadh airport is designed to be a wonderful, welcoming and inspiring structure. A thing of beauty.........and yet.......and yet....it is the most impractical, inefficient and hellish airport it has ever been my misfortune to use!!!!!!!
Beautiful? Yes. Well designed? Absolutely not!!
The problem is one of space and, more importantly, the complete lack of well used space. I can only assume that the architect had never designed an airport before and had a complete lack of understanding about how airport actually functions. The design almost seems to deliberately put obstacles in the way of the passengers. After all, isn't the hallmark of a good airport the way it is designed to efficiently and quickly funnel passengers to their correct gate and to board their plane?
Problems at Riyadh begin as soon as you arrive....because half the time, you cant actually get through the front doors due to the congestion inside. The check in desks are a thing of extraordinary confusion and bad design. As you can see form the sketch above. The check in desks are arranged in a pyramid shape, right in front of the airport entrance. So everyone is queuing for the check in desks right in front of the entrance.
It gets worse. To get to the check in desk, you and your luggage have to go through an X-ray machine, metal detector and security check. As you can imagine this leads to very long queues at the check in desks.
Once you've actually checked in you then have to go back the way you came and into the main entrance hall. This mean you have to go back through the same X-ray scanners and metal detectors whilst people are trying to come through from the other side to get to the check in desks!!
Once in the main entrance hall you have to fight through the queues of people trying to get to check in in order to go to to passport control and the departure gates. Of course at passport control there are only 3 desks and so the queues for passport control are fighting for space with the queues for the check in desks.
In short it is the most ludicrous design of a modern airport that I have ever seen.
I can only think that the Fountain, waterfall and trees are designed to lower the blood pressure of the poor sods whose blood is shooting from their ears by the time they actually reach the departure lounge!!!
This is a typical example of how things dont work in the Magic Kingdom.
No comments:
Post a Comment