Pittsburgh’s airport just got a nature-focused makeover

Pittsburgh International Airport (PIT) was never really meant to serve Pittsburgh. When the modern airport opened in 1992, it was built as a hub for U.S. Airways, primarily serving as a connection point for passengers heading elsewhere. Tens of millions of passengers used PIT annually, though only a small number of them were actually flying into or out of Greater Pittsburgh. Most stayed in the terminal, leaving one gate only to enter another, which was fine—until it wasn’t.

“In 2004, the hub went away. Passengers plummeted. All those connecting passengers left,” says Christina Cassotis, who came on as CEO of the Allegheny County Airport Authority in 2015. After years of waiting for the hub, or any hub, to return, the airport authority decided it was time to accept that what PIT had become is an airport meant for people flying into or out of Pittsburgh. “We needed the facility to match the business plan,” Cassotis says.

This month, more than 20 years after the U.S. Airways hub left town, Pittsburgh is opening a new $12.7 billion airport terminal building that embraces its status as an origin-and-destination airport, and one that puts its local passengers first.

Designed by Gensler and HDR in association with Luis Vidal + Architects, the new PIT landside terminal where passengers arrive and check in to their flights is a grand and welcoming entry hall with light flooding through from all sides. It’s essentially a canopy of a building, with a soaring and undulating roof overhead. Slits in its wavy top bring light in and offer views to the skies outside while subtly directing travelers through the security checkpoint and to their gates.

Rooted to the region

Pittsburgh’s airport design concept came from Luis Vidal + Architects, known for its work on airports including London’s Heathrow Airport Terminal 2 and Boston’s Logan Airport Terminal E. “It was very obvious the hub was never coming back and this was going to be a destination and origin or an origin and destination. That’s the first clue for this design,” Vidal says. “It’s going to be for the place. It’s going to be rooted to the region, to the city, to its people.”

Vidal says the concept was intended to reflect what he calls Pittsburgh’s virtues: nature, technology, and community. This is most obvious in the roof, with a curvaceous form that was inspired by the region’s rolling and forested hills. The roof’s hilly forms roll alongside each other, creating space for light to pour down into the building. Vidal says the effect is akin to taking a walk in a forest. “You see pockets of light coming down through the trees and the trunks,” he says.

In this case, the trunks are massive branching steel supports that hold up the roof, powder coated in bronze and poking through the pale wood ceiling. It’s not as fully organic as the recently completed mass timber terminal at Portland International Airport, but the effect is a much calmer setting than conventional terminals that are strong-armed with hard gray concrete and steel.

The connection to nature in Pittsburgh’s airport design goes even deeper. Around the terminal building’s sides and in the negative space before it connects with the airport’s X-shaped concourse, large landscaped open spaces are available for travelers and airport staff alike. Two are positioned on the landside, and accessible to the public.

Two others are on the airside, past security, and offer a rare space for airport travelers to access fresh air in an almost park-like setting. In contrast to other airports, where outdoor space is small, if it is available at all, PIT’s outdoor terraces make up more than two acres. It’s an amenity that had no small cost, and one that almost got abandoned in the evolution of the design from a concept in 2018 to a completed project in 2025.

“We had actually value-engineered that out,” Cassotis admits. “We were like, we can’t do this.” But the pandemic changed minds at the airport, and there was a renewed recognition that access to the outdoors and fresh air would be a benefit to all airport users. “It really became clear to us that we needed to do this and we needed it to be available to everybody,” Cassotis says. The airport declined to disclose how much the terraces cost.

The terraces are also designed to work around Pittsburgh’s sometimes volatile weather. Carolyn Sponza, a studio director in Gensler’s Pittsburgh office, says the architects worked to ensure that at least one of the terraces would be accessible year-round, no matter the weather. “Part of that design process was working with the maintenance staff to locate every single piece of equipment they needed to make sure that the walkways were clear, and laying it out in a maintenance room with the hose bed next door,” she says.

It’s one of the side benefits of working on an airport like Pittsburgh’s as it transforms from a major hub to a more modest origin-and-destination airport. “A lot of the places that we work in the United States, we’re trying to fix the airports or bring them into this century, but they’re space constrained,” Sponza says. “One of the unique things that this airport had was the ability to dream big and set the vision, and not just try to incrementally fix what was there before.”

As Pittsburgh’s airport design officially opens to the public, the redesign is about right-sizing a facility for its actual needs, but also about resetting the expectations of the locals who’ll be its primary users. Rather than brooding as many have for many years over the U.S. Airways hub leaving the airport, the new terminal is a chance to start again.

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