TERMINAL 3 EXPANSION, COPENHAGEN AIRPORT

• 80,000 sq m terminal expansion
• Capacity from 30m to 40m passengers
• 270 m runway-facing window

Why Real-Time Rendering Suits a Terminal of This Scale

A note on sourcing: aec+tech lists Enscape as the tool associated with this case study. Vilhelm Lauritzen Architects has not published a tool-specific account of the Terminal 3 expansion, so what follows explains why a real-time rendering and VR workflow fits this class of project rather than describing a documented step-by-step of this project's own process.

The experience is the design

An 80,000 square metre terminal is judged almost entirely from the inside, at eye level, in motion. The things that decide whether it works, how the undulating ceiling reads from the concourse floor, whether the green light shafts function as wayfinding markers, how the 270 metre runway window frames the view, are spatial and sequential qualities that plans, sections and isolated still renderings capture badly. A navigable real-time model reproduces the passenger's actual experience: walking the route, turning a corner, looking up.

What Enscape provides

Enscape is a real-time rendering and virtual reality plugin that runs inside Revit, SketchUp, Rhino, Archicad and Vectorworks. It renders from the live authoring model rather than an exported copy, so geometry and material changes appear immediately and the visualization cannot drift out of step with the documentation. It supports walkthroughs, panoramas and VR review, and later releases add asset libraries, animation and Enscape Impact for thermal comfort and environmental analysis.

Why it matters on an infrastructure client team

Airport projects are decided by large mixed groups: airport operations, retail concessions, security, baggage handling, aviation authorities and the design team. Very few of them read drawings. A model that anyone can walk through is the most efficient way to reach agreement across that many stakeholders, and on a project running from 2023 to 2028 the cost of a late change makes early agreement genuinely valuable.

Growing capacity inside a working airport

Copenhagen Airport had to expand from roughly 30 million to 40 million annual passengers without interrupting an operating terminal. That constrains phasing, logistics and structure in ways that a greenfield building never faces, and it puts a premium on getting the design settled before work starts on site.

Three terminals, three architectural languages

The existing complex was built in distinct eras with distinct expressions. The expansion had to unify them rather than add a fourth idiom, which is a difficult judgement to make from drawings alone and depends on how the new roof reads against the old fabric in real views.

Orientation in a very large hall

In an 80,000 square metre volume, passengers lose their bearings easily. The design answers this with the green light shafts, the central garden and the 270 metre runway window as fixed reference points, but whether those devices actually work is a question about sightlines and sequence, not about plan geometry.

Daylight in a deep plan

Bringing usable, comfortable daylight deep into a two-level terminal without glare on screens, signage or retail is a genuine technical constraint, and it drove both the translucent ceiling and the vertical shafts.

The conventional approach on a terminal project is to export the design model into a separate visualization application and render offline, then repeat the export after each design change. Immersive review, where it happens at all, is produced as a one-off set piece for a milestone presentation rather than as an everyday design check.

The weakness of that workflow on a project of this size is drift. The render becomes a snapshot of a model that has already moved on, and because each update is expensive, review imagery tends to lag the design. Plug-in based real-time rendering removes the export step and keeps the visual model and the documentation model the same object.

Vilhelm Lauritzen Architects has not published the visualization workflow used on this project, so the comparison above describes general practice rather than the firm's documented prior process.

This project is under construction with completion scheduled for 2028, and no time or cost savings have been published against any specific software tool, so no ROI figures are claimed here. The measurable outcomes below are the ones the project itself sets out.

Capacity

The clearest metric is throughput. The expansion is designed to take Copenhagen Airport from around 30 million to 40 million passengers a year, a roughly one third increase, delivered through an 80,000 square metre extension rather than a new terminal on a new site. For the operator, reusing and extending the existing terminal preserves the value of the current infrastructure and keeps arrivals, departures and transfers in one building.

A column-free floor plate

Suspending the upper floor from the roof structure removes columns from the main hall. That is an operational asset as much as an architectural one: it leaves the operator free to re-plan security lanes, retail units and queuing as passenger patterns change over the building's life, without structural intervention.

Passenger experience as commercial performance

In terminals, orientation and dwell quality translate fairly directly into retail and dining revenue. The light shafts, garden room and runway window are wayfinding and comfort devices, and the wooden floors continue a calm material palette from the existing terminals. Passengers who know where they are spend less time anxious and more time in the concession areas.

Sustainability governance

Thornton Tomasetti's peer review and sustainability consulting, including design charrettes covering daylight, energy, comfort, MEP, materials, health, wellness and water, puts an independent check on whether the structural and environmental design actually meet the stated targets.

Project credits

Architect: Vilhelm Lauritzen Architects, with Zeso Architects. Client: Copenhagen Airport. Engineering: COWI A/S. Contractor: Aarsleff. Structural peer review and sustainability consulting: Thornton Tomasetti. Location: Kastrup, Copenhagen, Denmark. Size: 80,000 square metres. Budget: approximately 530 million euros. Construction: 2023 to 2028.

About Vilhelm Lauritzen Architects

Vilhelm Lauritzen Architects is one of Denmark's oldest architecture practices, founded in 1922. The office has a long association with Copenhagen Airport, including the listed Vilhelm Lauritzen Terminal of 1939, which gives the current expansion an unusual continuity of authorship across nearly a century of the same site.