Glass, steel and the memory of Hudhud

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

The shape came from the sea. The reason from a storm. On October 12, 2014, Cyclone Hudhud came ashore at Visakhapatnam with sustained winds of 185 kmph, flooded the airport, peeled the roof off the terminal and smashed the radar. The building was patched back into service inside a week. Every choice at Bhogapuram answers that week.

Officials of the 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.” That runs well above the Indian code, which puts this coast in its highest wind band, about 198 kmph.

To feel those numbers is the glass, 21 metres of it, floor to roof, without a break. Writing in WFM Media in July 2026, Rajan Govind, Director of BES Consultants, which engineered the facade said: “The glazing is designed for wind loads of 5.5 to 5.75 kilopascals, beyond what ordinary cladding fixings can hold. The team turned to bolt-and-nut systems, reinforced the critical panels, 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

The best of the ornament hangs under the oval skylight: 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. Singapore’s supertree grove, turned over and hung indoors. 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 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 muggu 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. Along the departures hall an LED band shows a gopuram, now of Tirupati, then of Simhachalam.

A garden at its feet

The gardens borrow a thought from Bengaluru and carry it half the distance. Kempegowda gave a whole terminal to one idea, the terminal in a garden. At Bhogapuram the beds are cut in loops across the forecourt and the planting repeats the curve of the roof. Handsome from the air; on the ground the trees are saplings still. Indoors the green is potted, where in Bengaluru it climbs through the concourse.