Twenty-one metres of glass on a cyclone coast: inside the Bhogapuram terminal
The new Bhogapuram International Airport terminal features a unique fish-inspired design engineered to withstand extreme cyclonic conditions. The structure is built to handle wind speeds up to 275 kmph, significantly exceeding standard safety requirements.
Why it matters
It demonstrates advancements in climate-resilient infrastructure design for coastal regions prone to severe weather events.
From the air, the terminal at Alluri Sitarama Raju International Airport in Bhogapuram is a fish. The roof runs as one long silver shell, ribbed into bays that ripple front to back the way gill slits do on the underside of a ray, and it flings out a pier to carry the aerobridges, so the plan reads as a fish: check-in in the belly, gates in the tail.
The shape GMR took from the sea. The reason they took from a storm. On October 12, 2014, Cyclone Hudhud came ashore at Visakhapatnam with three-minute sustained winds of 185 kmph, flooded the present Visakhapatnam International (INS Dega) airport, peeled the roof off the terminal and smashed the radar. Civil flights had stopped a day earlier as the storm closed in; the building was patched back into service inside a week. Every choice at Bhogapuram answers that week.
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