The Miraculous Floating Airport | Super Structures | Spark

Off the coast of Japan there is a

super

structure so immense that it can be seen from space, the world's first

airport

in the middle of the sea, the largest artificial island of its time, the longest bridge of its kind and one of the architectural masterpieces of the world. world, but its brilliant design could not conquer a hostile land today low-tech ingenuity saves its high-tech engineering is Kansai the

airport

of the future or is it doomed to sink beneath the waves Japan where modern skyscrapers eclipsed the monuments of bygone eras where Eternal serenity mixes with industrial power and one of the world's engineering wonders rises from the sea a

super

structure for the 21st century the mile-long terminal at Kansai International Airport floats like a giant silver bird over a man-made island in Osaka Bay elegant in design, Japan's streamlined airport is a triumph of construction and a technological marvel.

It was quite extraordinary to me that when the building first opened it received 10,000 visitors a day who weren't there to fly, they were there to look at the building and that says something about the building of the world. first ocean The airport's architects and engineers deeply investigate the laws of nature in search of answers to the impressive challenges presented to them. Thousands of workers worked for seven years to build the largest artificial island of its time, more than three miles offshore in waters 60 feet deep. chronicle with the longest building in the world the largest public works project of the 20th century the airport is the first place and the last place that people normally see in your city so you want it to represent something about your city you want it to look good you want that they have a favorable impression when they arrive and when they leave we no longer build large cathedrals but today we build large airports Kansai International is a brilliant masterpiece widely considered one of the most beautiful airports in the world and one of the most daring engineering projects in modern history.

Before Kansai, no one had built an island in water so deep or so far from land, from steel beams to workers' lunches, everything had to be transported to the construction site by boat to create the island, work teams had to to move 750 million cubic feet of earth. Hitting a million steel columns at the bottom of the ocean and working more than 10 million man-hours. Have you found that I explored the site by helicopter and thought, oh my God, this could be a big challenge, why did you take on the challenge of building a building Kansai International Airport on land would have been almost impossible.

Kansai is a 10,000-square-mile region in central Japan, straddling the honor of Honshu, about 300 miles southwest of Tokyo, within its two borders of Japan. major cities the expanding industrial centers of Osaka and Kobe in the 1960s the concise cities were losing ground imports and exports from Japan flowed through Tokyo to compete with Tokyo consignment needed a new international airport this airport was not only very important for Kansai but also for the whole world The Japanese economy before Kansai airport, manufacturing companies based in Kansai had to send their cargo all the way to Tokyo to ship it out of the country, which was very inconvenient.

Oh Sokka, Tommy's airport was in the middle of a residential neighborhood dangerously surrounded by buildings. The constant roar of the jet engines bothered their neighbors there is no way around it the planes fly overhead they make noise they have emission particles from the jet engines and they end up in people's yards and roofs and in people's ears when When You were trying to watch TV or have a BBQ, a lot of families lived in that area so the potential was dangerous if something went wrong. Thank God, it wasn't like that. At the end of the runway, right on the approach, there was a school, if you were always aware that the school was there and which is not the best, expanding it Tommy was out of the question, but the area was to find Len for a new airport in densely populated Japan, there was little vacant land and few people willing to donate.

They took back the land they owned in 1969 Tokyo began construction of an international airport in Narita, a distant suburb populated mainly by farmers, when the government confiscated farmland to build the airport, protests broke out, outraged farmers laid siege to the construction site Narita, leftist radicals fired rockets across the runway, police arrested more than 3,000 activists seven people died protests delayed construction of Nara airport for almost a decade narottama in the narrative case the government carried out the plan without giving much information to the people, you could say that the government imposed its plan on the people and that caused a strong anti-construction movement.

The best way to deal with noise pollution and angry neighbors was to avoid them all together Kansai decided to build their new airport on the waters of Osaka Bay there's no one out there it's suitable Silly Middleville babe maybe maybe a Marlin here or there or something, with no neighbors to bother, a water airport could stay open 24 hours a day day, making it even more competitive with Tokyo, but the plan had other dangers. The fishermen of Osaka could have argued for a water airport as bitterly as the farmers of Rita had fought. an airport on land mom, my fish travel on their own routes, which the fishermen know, if there is any change in those routes, it is very difficult for the fishermen to fish, it is not that the fish travel along marked roads to find them again, it is very difficult to avoid. another Narita the authorities offered the fisherman a huge fee as compensation for disturbing their fishing grounds the fishermen accepted politically the way was now clear but the project's problems were just beginning by locating their airport on the water the concise planners had avoided battles with outraged citizens across the land, but they would still soon find themselves fighting a much more powerful force, the force of nature itself.

Japan's four main islands have been considered the most geologically treacherous properties on the planet. Nine major earthquakes of magnitude greater than seven occurred in the 20th century alone, killing more than 150,000 people. Thousands of small Templars rock Japan every month and earthquakes cause major damage to

structures

built on landfills that liquefy when they are not shaking Japan is reeling from some of the planet's deadliest storms since World War II. Hundreds of typhoons have devastated the Japanese coast. killed nearly 7,000 people a typhoon storm winds can cause what meteorologists call a storm surge a dangerous rise in sea level on September 21, 1934 a storm surge raised the level of Osaka Bay by three meters for several hours that typhoon killed 3,000 people three miles offshore the new Kansai airport would be completely exposed to the fury of typhoons if a typhoon one day destroyed the new multimillion-dollar airport if its foundations would dissolve in an earthquake with storms or earthquakes cut off its connections to land new Kansai airport would have to survive some of nature's changes most powerful in slots Engineers designed an island two and a half miles long and nearly 4,000 feet wide framed by a massive rectangular seawall whose perimeter would be seven miles long.

Into this enormous frame they would pour 750 million cubic feet of soil. It seemed like a simple task. plan a larger version of other projects that Japanese engineers had successfully completed many times before in the starving land of Kansai the coast is lined with industries built on artificial land but three miles from the coast the conditions were very different the bottom of the The sea is something like a hundred meters deep soft clay, in fact, so soft that if you could drain the sea you would not be able to welcome it, since a swamp test showed that the airport island would rest on two levels of clay from the ocean floor, the top layer called alluvial clay did not.

Engineers worried because they had built on it many times before, but three miles offshore was an older, deeper stratum called diluvial clay that extended a thousand feet below the alluvial layer. Engineers had never built anything on this diluvial clay, no one was sure how it would react when the world's largest artificial island started putting pressure on it, so the new problem is how to predict the compression of the old, deep-rooted rigid clay, so I think it is the first case in the history of human engineering, whatever law is co-opted to find out the condition of the ground of the foundation we develop a method to take samples of the clay itself we calculate things like the correlation of strength and pressure density to understand the characteristics of the terrain scientists analyzed core samples from the ocean floor and gave different predictions about how far the airport could sink into the clay some believed it would sink only 19 feet others insisted it could sink up to 25 feet officials made a fateful decision to save money rejected predictions of deeper sinking and planned an airport that would sink only 19 feet January 1987 with prayers For the safety of workers, construction begins on Kansai International Airport, The first task is to strengthen the soft clay of the ocean floor so that it can support the immense weight of the airport.

To strengthen the seabed. Engineers use a well-proven method known as sandblasting. Specially designed ships float above it. The construction site first spreads a five-foot layer of sand on the ocean floor, then hammers 1 million pipes deep into the clay; It is a fully automated process controlled by onboard computers; then huge barges equipped with pile drivers drive sand into each tube, finally computer-controlled boats. take out each pipe leaving a million columns of sand when the finished airport presses the flooded clay its weight will squeeze the water out of the clay into the sand piles draining the clay to make it harder but the sand drains can't reach the clay deeper flood nothing can be done to stabilize it with sand drains installed work on the seawall begins to prevent waves from carrying away debris from the slope of the seawall workers must shield its surface with huge stones 60 feet below the surface divers guide these armored stones into position divers are veterans of many underwater construction projects, but none as deep and as far from shore as the Kansai airport, they face deadly dangers in the turbulent depths of the ocean in this place we place stones weighing between one and two tons each in the water that was far from the coast. so there were bigger waves it was a challenge for us, we did it even in difficult situations, like in bad weather, a man had his leg amputated at the thigh because the waves moved a stone and it crashed against his leg, always we were on the brink of death in a Despite the dangers, work on the boardwalk continued as workers maneuvered 69 giant steel chambers into place.

Each of these gigantic shells was 75 feet high, 75 feet in diameter, and weighed more than 200 tons. A pile driver drove them into the ocean floor to form the corners of the wall. Seawall workers placed 48,000 four-pointed concrete blocks along the southern and western edges, where the sea was strongest. These strange-looking blocks are designed to dissipate the force of breaking waves. In June 1989, two and a half years after work began, the seawall was already completed, the airport builders had to find enough land to fill it in the continent. Crews worked 24 hours a day excavating three entire mountains. Large barges transported the excavated earth to the airport site for three years.

A fleet of 80 ships dumped dirt into the seawall until it rose more than a hundred feet above the ocean floor. Global positioning systems directed each barge through its onboard computers telling it exactly where to drop each load. The island fill combined three different sizes, of course, rock and gravel. Engineers hope this mixture will slowly resist liquefaction in an earthquake. The airport island emerged from the sea despite violent protests. The same left-wing radicals who stormed Narita airport launched a mortar attack against one of the quarries that supply the islands. No one is hurt, but exploding mortar shells start a fireforest that burns for hours.

Just one of more than two dozen attacks on the airport project during construction, planting bombs, firing rockets and setting fires, the radicals destroyed equipment and injured four people, but the work never slowed as some workers built the island, other equipment They were busy grounding it in the fall. In 1987, giant

floating

cranes brought the first pre-assembled bridge pier to Osaka Bay, anchoring it on piles driven into the seabed in the spring of 1989. 29 of these pairs lined up between the airport island and the mainland. The giant cranes returned with huge steel modules each. More than 500 feet long and weighing more than 4,000 tons, linked together they formed a double-deck truss bridge more than 2 miles long, a third longer than the Golden Gate Bridge with a price tag of more than billion dollars.

Its top debt was at a high level. Its lower deck. a railway track flexible joints connected its sections so that the giant bridge would not bend and break in the deadly winds of a typhoon in March 1990 a bridge was built at the airport The island was almost complete the open ocean was little dominant This artificial island was created by the sweat, blood and tears effort of more than 10,000 people who worked very hard but the celebration of the island builders was silent by then they had discovered a new and implacable threat an enemy so powerful that it could defeat them spring of 1990 Kansai Airport's artificial island is almost finished.

Construction companies prepare for the monumental task of building the passenger terminal, but in March engineers make an alarming discovery that threatens to destroy the project. Kansai airport is sinking into the sea. Airport officials expected the island to sit about 19 feet on the soft sea floor, but by March 1990 it had sunk 27 feet and was still sinking more than two inches each month. No one knew when or if the sinking would stop. No one knows exactly what to do because it is quite different from our past experience. It is large in size and has a very heavy load. two factors combined give rise to the effect of awakening the sleeping lions.

The revelation surprised Osaka and the nation that the international press dubbed the sinking of Japan's airport; some compared it to the most notorious engineering mistake in history: the Leaning Tower of Pisa, after 20 years of planning, three years of construction and billions of dollars, it seemed that Kansai airport could never be built. had seemed like genius now it seemed to be simply arrogance as public outrage grew the president of Kansai airport the resigned engineers rushed to find a solution, if there was one, we cannot stop the compression of this type of soil because we can cope with the ground with several new techniques up to differences in level of 50 or 60 meters, but now the ground in the question is 200 meters deep, so we cannot apply any type of artificial technique to keep the airport above sea level.

Workers piled an additional 11½ feet of dirt on top of the island. At a cost of 150 million dollars, they dropped a weight of 20 tons 100 feet on the runway on compacted soil. They decided to pave the runway with asphalt because asphalt would absorb the movements of the earth better than concrete, but their biggest problem remained unsolved. It was time to build Kansai International's Splash Model, but how could they build it on a sinking island while engineers debated terminals? The architects perfected their design. Noriaki Okabe had spent 25 years in Europe working with the world-renowned Italian architect Renzo Piano. Together they had created some of the most notable in the world. buildings, including the famous Pompidou Center in Paris, but in Kansai they face the challenge of their careers.

The side terminal has to be small enough to fit on an artificial island but large enough to accommodate all the complex functions of a modern international airport. Low enough to inspire passengers with its beauty, but low enough to allow air traffic controllers an unrestricted view of every plane on the runway, it seemed like an architectural paradox. Architects are usually stimulated by looking at the site before work begins. This project was unique because there was no site yet there was no land looking for new sources of inspiration the architects turned to the

structures

of nature the geometries of nature they solved their most difficult problem how to make the terminal, both high and low, respond to the torus the shape Remarkably versatile from magnetic fields, convection currents, bicycle tires, donuts and fruits in the eyes of its architects, the enormous Kansai terminal is just the small visible portion of an immense toroid more than 20 miles in diameter that circulates through the land.

The torus shape allows the center of the building to rise to 85 feet tall while its wings taper to 20 feet, inspiring visitors. Giving the control tower a clear view of the planes and making architectural history, it is the most confronted form in the natural world of the toroid and, as far as I know, this was the first time that it was certainly the first time that it was used in a large structure. Since Kansai was designed, the toroid has become a very fashionable shape, particularly among architects working with British engineers who have mastered how to use this shape, but innovative at the time, the torus solved the problem of designing the passenger terminal, but the biggest problem was still unsolved.

From everything about building one of the world's largest buildings on an island sinking into the sea, in the spring of 1990 an international team of architects and engineers had created a cutting-edge design for the Kansai Airport passenger terminal. The plans were ready, but the terminal would not be built until the builders solved the perplexing problem. The completed terminal would weigh only half the vast amount of earth excavated for its foundation on an island that was sinking into the sea. The lighter terminal would not. It would sink as fast as the heaviest island. When the island and the terminal separated, the massive structure would surely crack.

The problem is not that the building is sinking into the ground, but that the ground is sinking faster than the building, people don't realize it, but the building is actually

floating

on the ground, that's one of the For reasons they have to have basements, they are like ships and that is particularly true of the new earth, so the Cancer airport is ballasted with a quarter of a million tons of very dense iron ore while As they prepared to build the terminal, engineers lined its foundation with an 8-foot-thick layer of crushed iron ore in hopes that the additional weight would help the terminal sink as quickly as the island on April 24, 1991.

Construction of the terminal would take almost three years to complete, according to the architect's plans. Workers erected about 30 steel beams to support the roof, each of these huge beams weighing more than 200 tons, then workers assembled the terminal skeleton of 250 ribs, each forged in England and transported by ship to Japan, installing almost 5,000 glass panels across its wide front, carefully enclosing each panel in a rubber frame so that it will move, not break if an earthquake or typhoon shakes the building. They cover the roof with 90,000 stainless steel tiles tested to withstand strong typhoon winds and violent seismic tremors.

With painstaking effort, workers place each of these tiles individually by hand so that the ocean winds make their task even more difficult and sometimes impossible. In 1993 the enormous shape of the terminal towered over the airport island more than a million of architects, engineers and workers from around the world had contributed to its construction. Today Noriyuki Okabe walks proudly through a superstructure widely heralded as one of the most brilliantly designed airport terminals in the world. It is a very large building, possibly the building longest in history, it is not a factory but a huge room occupied by people, but what is very surprising is the very intimate relationship that it establishes between you, the person who moves there, and the building that is making way for you guiding you through this it is a very extraordinary feeling to walk into what is a huge, highly technological building.

I think it is one of his most extraordinary achievements. Arrive by railcar, rail or hydrofoil. Passengers enter what the architects call. Kenya is a vast open space 100 feet high and nearly a thousand feet long of cavernous stories linked by escalators and whirring elevators designed to impress but also to inform. The reason this space is so big is so people can see where they are going. All spaces of this structure can be seen from anywhere as you move beyond the canyon. Passengers do not have to navigate a sprawling multi-terminal complex like many other airports. Domestic and international arrivals and departures are stacked vertically on the four floors of the terminal building, passengers ride up and down a central set of escalators that take them to arriving and departing domestic and international flights, finally emerging at the terminal's spectacular departures area, a sort of aviation cathedral that stretches more than a mile long, making Kansai Terminal the longest building in the world.

The world's automated trains take passengers to their 41 boarding gates The travel time from the Central Terminal to the end of each journey is just 90 seconds An ingenious system solves a perplexing problem How can the longest building be air-conditioned of the world if a great air is blown? Jet in a very large space, it travels so far now what we did at Kenzi, which I think is quite innovative, was create a ceiling shape that was similar to the shape of an air jet and glue the jet to the ceiling if you do a gush of air adheres to the ceiling, then travels up to twice as far as if it were in free space and will cause a much greater circulation current.

The 18 gigantic but elegant nozzles send the air flowing along the ceiling on two sheets of soft fabric that keep it circulating. The colorful mobiles reveal the air in motion. It is the first time it has been done on such a large scale and it is the first time that the shape of the roof and structure was exactly adapted to the decelerating air jet. It is a building that is more in tune with what is happening in the sciences and should herald the future, but when it was completed, the future of the kunzite terminals remained in doubt as the island below continued to sink even with its ore ballast. of iron, the terminal would almost certainly break like the heavier island below.

It sank Engineers came up with a surprisingly simple solution in the basement. 900 concrete columns support the enormous weight of the building, but that's not all they do, as the terminal sinks. Sensors on the columns alert computers in the central control room. Technicians scan computer screens thoroughly for trouble spots. another beautiful wall this screen shows the current sinking of the terminal building the areas in red have less subsidence, the nose in blue has more when the computers warn that the sinking island threatens to crack the terminal workers raise or lower the columns in the area in danger area to keep it level with the ground use powerful hydraulic jacks that can move columns up to 15 inches if necessary workers slide iron plates under the raised pillars to support them after the jacks have been removed it is not Unlike sliding a box of matches under the leg of a wobbly coffee table, but the Kansai terminal has nine hundred legs and weighs almost three million tons.

It's a solution that, as I understand it, has been used before in Japan and may seem a little primitive, but I have no reason to suspect that it is anything but perfect for the problem - in fact, everything in the basement of the terminals is designed to move the air conditioning up and down and other systems are bolted to the ceiling instead of the floor. The doors have several centimeters of additional roof space in their effort to save the side terminal engineers tried to think of everything entitled: this terminal building is being adjusted all the time.

I'm on the stairs that connect the first floor and the basement. The step where I am standing now was the height of the floor when the airport opened its doors in the last four years. We reinforced it three times and, as a result, added two more steps. Measures like these helped the airport cope with the sinking of the island, but also delayed its completion for more than a year, on September 4, 1994. Kansai International Airport finally opened itsdoors The Emperor's son, Crown Prince Naruhito and his wife, Princess Masako, attended the opening ceremonies. Eleven thousand police stood guard in case the radicals attacked while they were celebrating.

Little did the airport's proud builders know that nature's fury would soon assault their masterpiece at dawn on January 17. 1995 Kansai International Airport has been open 15 months to begin this day will be severely tested At 5:46 a.m. On January 17, a devastating 7.2 earthquake hits the Kansai region. The massive timber is the deadliest earthquake to hit Japan since the Great Tokyo Earthquake of 1923. I was still in bed because it was quite early in the morning, it was a very big movement. The dishes jumped out of the cupboard in my house. It had never experienced such a large earthquake before the hardest hit was the city of Kobe.

The city pier rises. Ten-foot cranes buckle and a port breakwater sinks railroad lines and major roads buckle Earthquake kills more than 5,000 people and injures more than 25,000 More than 300,000 people lose their homes Kansai International Airport is just 18 miles away from the epicenter when the earthquake first hit I thought about my family, then I thought about Kansai airport, maybe the glass, fearing the worst, officials rushed to the airport outside the terminal, found a cracked sidewalk and some other signs of damage. I rushed to the airport in my car and arrived before 7 O'clock, when I ran into this control room, all the machines were working properly.

The airport had either survived one of nature's deadliest attacks or was so devastated it seemed too good to be true. When I arrived at Kansai airport, we could see Co. Bey was burning although nothing bad could be seen. He had great anxiety about the invisible parts of the airport. Inspections confirmed that the airport's anti-seismic measures had worked. Engineers had used a mixture of large rocks to build the airport island when the earthquake hit this corridor. the landfill absorbed the tremors in the fill the rocks if they had been smaller the island's soil could have liquefied the airport buildings would have collapsed like so many other structures in their place the delicate looking passenger terminal proved to be as strong as its architecture I hope that thanks to its ingenious design no one understands everything, for example in this bridge that side of the building is fixed and this side has a sliding system to absorb the impact at the time of the Kobe earthquake this point moved almost four inches even the terminals huge glass walls were intact Jonnie no loki era It is important not to transmit the movement of the roof in an earthquake to the glass wall below.

We designed a system that absorbed all movements between the two structures through the use of sliding or rotating joints. During the Kobe earthquake, this system worked so well that not a single pane of glass broke. Kansai International remained open throughout the crisis, serving as a staging area for arriving rescue teams and supplies. The building was in fact the closest building to the epicenter of the earthquake that destroyed Kobe, which does not mean that it was the most affected because the buildings in Kobe also did not suffer heavy damage, but because they had been designed to cope with all these things, they resisted without any damage.

Surviving the Kobe earthquake was a triumph for the concise, beleaguered engineers. The airport had passed a significant test of its engineering and design three years later would face another when nature struck again. On September 22, 1998, a powerful typhoon hits the Japanese coast killing ten people and injuring more than 200 winds clocked at 130 miles per hour and roaring across Osaka Bay kicking up dangerous waves and rain and sludge. its fury reaches the Kansai airport the typhoon that increased the speed to the point where we arrived at the same time and yes we had quite strong winds but the difficult thing was that the people who try to park us on the ground keep them from being impressed literally right after landing In fact, the Airport Authority closed the airport due to the difficulty of the overpass between the mainland and the island was unusable for vehicle traffic.

When we were crossing the overpass going to the mainland, there was a motorcycle that fell and there were a couple of accidents that We had seen, so it was smart of them to suspend them for the night, the typhoon had passed and Kansai airport resumed normal operations, the roof of the terminal had suffered minor damage, but airport officials felt lucky that the typhoon would have threatened the sinking island, which now sits just 17 feet above sea level. An ingenious and concise lifting system keeps the terminal building level, but it cannot prevent the island from sinking each year.

The airport sinks another foot into the sea. Scientists debate how much further the island will sink, but some believe that if it continues to sink a typhoon waves will one day flood the airport. He is from Tunisia. How to avoid water invasion? Let's start with the type of sea pollution, perhaps five or ten years from now, if the maximum elevation of the artificial island drops further. some specific value at the time of high tide or at the time when it is quite easy to see the water flowing in, that is our biggest concern at the time when the plane cannot land on the pond.

London baby must be dry at all times to avoid storms. Engineers must build a higher level. boardwalk around the airport, but this is not the only challenge they must face if the airport is to survive economically it must expand since its opening in 1994 its volume of international flights has almost doubled its only runway can handle 160,000 takeoffs and landings a year in the year 2007 will reach that number without a second runway Kansai will be drowning in its own traffic the airport plans to build a second runway and terminal on a parallel island connected to the original airport but this island must be built in even deeper waters than the First, The seabed is even softer.

Scientists believe the second island could sink even more than the first at the new site. We have to build the island on a poorly soft foundation, since it is impossible to eliminate the subsidence. We are thinking of building a second terminal. building between the old and new islands that will float in the sea like a ship, then we won't have to worry about it settling, but sinking is not the only obstacle to expansion. Kansai International The fight against the sinking problem drove up the price of the airport. The price tag amounts to $15 billion, 40% interest over budget, just on the airport's debt, which amounts to $560 million a year.

Building a second runway will cost an estimated $14 billion more, even if it never slips beneath the waves. Kansai International may sink under the crushing burden. of its debt and yet the second runway must be built. The future of the airport and perhaps the lives of its passengers depend on it. If you're going to be a major hub airport, you're really going to have to have two runways, because what happens if something goes wrong? wrong, what happens if you have an airplane that has a tire blow out and you are actually an operations center that brings in many airplanes at once?

When you consider the number of tires on each 747, a tire blows out as far as it goes. The plane is worried that you'll never know until you've cleared the runway; However, the carcass is on the runway and you certainly don't want a plane following you to find that it could be a major disaster for both landing gear and landing gear. or in terms of engines, so they have to sweep the runway and that takes time and when you have ten or twelve planes waiting to arrive, it becomes a very delicate matter, so a second runway is very, very important, even if it is surrounded by water.

Kansai International The airport is between a rock and a hard place Hong Kong and Singapore now have new state-of-the-art airports Narita in Tokyo is building a second runway to stay in the highly competitive world of Asian aviation Kansai must expand engineers need the second island, as much as airport officials want to build higher dikes to prevent typhoons from turning swampy on some days. The first island to build those walls must temporarily close the original runway, but the immense cost of saving the airport added to its already enormous debt. Its future Kansai International Airport may never fulfill its builders' dream of becoming one of Asia's major aviation hubs, but in some ways it's not the pithy problems most people remember, it's the pithy achievement its iconic design.

It has earned the praise of critics around the world and has earned the approval of the thousands of amazed travelers who pass through it each year. I think it will be some time before what has been achieved there is fully understood. Lessons will probably be learned in the 21st century more than in the coming years from the people of Kansai. They will understand more deeply what has been achieved there. I think the legacy that people are going to remember about the airport is that they built something that had never been heard of before for an airport and that even though they had problems they found very good solutions to make it work. and in fact it became an engineering marvel in several ways, first that they were able to fill it and then when it didn't settle at the rate that someone had calculated, they were able to solve that problem and continue to operate whatever the future held.

Kansai International Airport will always be a monument to a bold vision, a vision that dared to achieve something no one had attempted before, a vision that literally moved mountains, created land in the middle of the sea, and honored Japan with one of the world's largest airports. most beautiful in the world.