Victoria Airport Terminal Buildings (1963/93)

Sidney

Architects: Wade Stockdill Armour & Blewett
(extensions: Peterson and Lester, 1993)

The 1963 scheme for Victoria's new international terminal should be seen in the context of WSBA's concurrent work at the University of Victoria and Saanich Municipal Hall. In all these commissions the firm was demonstrating a strident international interpretation of modern expressionism. The terminal was therefore a low horizonal minimalist building, the spare reductivist geometry broken only slightly by the use of split granite panels for the gound floor walls. The structure expressed its steel skeleton, reinforced slab floors and precast concrete cladding systems. The interior circulation was organized around a two storey central concourse lit from tall glazed clerestorey. Numerous renovations have expanded the building, the most recent in 1993. (Also visible from the terminal building is the control tower (archt. Irvine Kew, 1988).