Airport terminals are hard to condition for a reason that has nothing to do with size. They’re mostly glass, the ceilings run three stories, and the people are all standing on the floor. Blowing conditioned air down from 40 feet to reach a concourse at ankle height is a losing proposition, and at the $9.5 billion New Terminal One at JFK the mechanical engineers stopped trying.
Eleven acres of tubing
Roughly 500,000 square feet of flooring, about 11 acres of tubing, will carry radiant heating and cooling beneath the concrete. Jaros, Baum & Bolles specified it as part of the AECOM Tishman and Gensler joint venture contracted in 2021, paired with a rooftop microgrid to hold down the energy load of what becomes a 2.6 million-square-foot terminal at completion in 2030. JB&B made the same call at Moynihan Train Hall, another glass-roofed public room where overhead air distribution doesn’t reach the occupants.
The detail that actually mattered
Slab depressions had to be deepened by five to nine inches. That sounds like a footnote until you consider what else runs under an airport concourse floor: power, security conduit, and now insulation and hydronic tubing, all sharing the same zone. Getting the finished walkway slabs flat, with no ramps or steps anywhere a passenger walks, meant coordinating those depths across an entire terminal before anyone poured.
Installation was the other change. Instead of hand-tying tubing to pins, which is how most radiant slabs get built and which eats labor hours at this scale, crews rolled out pre-engineered mats up to 187 feet long and pinned them with foam staples. On 11 acres, that’s the difference between a specialty scope and a production operation.
Radiant is getting a second look
These figures come from JB&B via ENR’s reporting rather than from a published case study, so treat the specifics as the engineer’s account. But the direction is consistent with what’s happening on large public interiors generally. Radiant floors move heat by conduction and radiation rather than by pushing air around, which cuts fan energy, and in a heavily glazed space they counteract the cold-surface effect that makes people uncomfortable at otherwise reasonable air temperatures.
The tradeoff is response time and repairability. A slab is slow, and anything embedded in it is expensive to reach. That’s a fair bet on a terminal expected to run for 50 years; it’s a worse one on a building with a short fit-out cycle.
The retrofit version of this problem is harder still. The Centre Pompidou renovation in Paris is attempting a full energy upgrade on a 1977 building whose services are all on the exterior, where there’s no slab to hide anything in at all.