The DWL Aviation team designed a new pedestrian walkway from the Terminal 4 International Concourse Federal Inspection Service (FIS) facility to the main terminal building. Major components of this facility include a tunnel, moving walkways, a botanical garden, four elevators, two escalators and a pedestrian bridge over Sky Harbor Boulevard. This project presented a series of design challenges to transfer the international passengers from the FIS facility to the terminal through a “sterile” route to avoid mixing with domestic passengers.

With a floor area of only 4,500 s.f., the vertical transfer portion of this project has a volume of over 200,000 cubic feet. In complexity, this project greatly exceeds most high-rise buildings. Intricate technical requirements and extremely tight site conditions led to this dynamic formal response. This project tunnels its way under a road and utilities, leaps over telecommunication duct banks, cantilevers a building halfway over a roadway, bridges a 200’+ span, and needles its way through a concrete brace frame to connect to the existing building.