From the air, the terminal at Alluri Sitarama Raju International Airport in Bhogapuram is a fish. The roof runs as one long silver shell, ribbed into bays that ripple front to back the way gill slits do on the underside of a ray, and it flings out a pier to carry the aerobridges, so the plan reads as a fish: check-in in the belly, gates in the tail.

Built against a storm

The shape GMR took from the sea. The reason they took from a storm. On October 12, 2014, Cyclone Hudhud came ashore at Visakhapatnam with three-minute sustained winds of 185 kmph, flooded the present Visakhapatnam International (INS Dega) airport, peeled the roof off the terminal and smashed the radar. Civil flights had stopped a day earlier as the storm closed in; the building was patched back into service inside a week. Every choice at Bhogapuram answers that week.

GMR Visakhapatnam International Airport Limited told The Hindu the new terminal “was designed to withstand severe cyclonic conditions, and it can sustain wind speeds of up to 275 kmph and heavy rainfall of up to 27 centimetres, with a drainage system built to handle extreme weather.” The claim runs well above the Indian code, which puts this coast in its highest wind band, about 198 kmph, and adds a cyclone factor written in after 2014 that lifts the design figure to roughly 257 kmph.

The place to feel those numbers is the glass. Twenty-one metres of it, floor to roof, without a break, on a shore with this history. Writing in WFM Media in July 2026, Rajan Govind, Director of BES Consultants, which engineered the facade, said the glazing spans run from 12 m to 21 m and are designed for wind loads of 5.5 to 5.75 kilopascals, that ordinary cladding fixings would not hold at those loads, and that the team turned to bolt-and-nut systems, reinforced the critical panels with perimeter frames, and pinned the tops of the connections so the roof can move in a gale without taking the glass with it.

An upturned grove under glass

There is a lot of ornament, and the best of it hangs under the oval. From the skylight droop a shoal of discs, 27 or so, held at different heights on thin stems, each spoked with radial ribs, some printed in cream, rose, slate and grey, others left as open mesh so the light falls through one onto the next. The effect is of Singapore’s supertree grove turned over and hung indoors under glass. Stand beneath them and they are parasols.

Muggulu motif

The line that binds the building is drawn on the ground in Andhra households every morning. GMR told The Hindu the terminal “has been conceived as a contemporary gateway to Andhra Pradesh, combining modern airport architecture with local cultural identity,” and that “traditional muggulu-inspired motifs, regional craftsmanship, local artistic references and design elements drawn from the culture of North Andhra have been incorporated throughout the passenger experience.” The floor argues the point better than the sentence. On the arrivals level the muggulu is cut in stone, white lines looping through dark granite at a scale so large that the passenger crossing it never sees the figure and the passenger on the balcony sees nothing else. In the ceilings the same stepped turns are traced in brass channels of light across coffered timber-look battens.

The wall that changes its mind

Along the departures hall a continuous LED band rides above the check-in rows, showing a gopuram now of Tirupati then of Simhachalam, with a fixed band of dense floral relief beneath it.

A garden at its feet

The gardens borrow a thought from Bengaluru and carry it half the distance. Kempegowda International Airport gave a whole terminal to a single idea, the terminal in a garden, with bamboo overhead, hanging gardens. At Bhogapuram the beds are cut in loops across the forecourt, grass runs in wide banks along the approach, and the planting repeats the curve of the roof. Handsome it is from the air; on the ground the trees are saplings still. Indoors the green is potted and sits at the atrium’s feet, where in Bengaluru it climbs through the concourse.

Published - July 29, 2026 07:42 pm IST