Memphis International Airport Terminal Modernization Program

Memphis International Airport is gutting and rebuilding a 1963 terminal without knocking it down. The Terminal Modernization Program is the largest capital project in the airport’s history at more than $700 million, and the joint venture running it has to deliver the work in seven separate packages while passengers keep moving through the building.

Project Scope

TAC Team JV, made up of Turner Construction Company, Chicago-based Ardmore Roderick and Memphis-based Chris Woods Construction, holds the construction manager at risk contract. The program is broken into seven packages: terminal face and vertical cores, departures lobby and checked baggage inspection system, ticket counters and bag make-up, employee screening, security and bag claim, marketplace and swing gate, and federal inspection services. Alliiance is the design partner on the terminal work and the new administration and CBIS building.

Concourse A demolition started in July 2025 and wrapped in early 2026, clearing the footprint for the terminal packages. The transit tunnel that runs beneath the terminal is being infilled with cellular concrete. That’s a seismic measure, driven by Memphis sitting inside the New Madrid seismic zone, and it is one of the few full seismic retrofits underway at a U.S. commercial terminal. Landside work is running in parallel. The departures-level inner drive and the B crosswalk reopened in June 2025, and replacing the outer commercial drive is a two-year job by itself.

Why It Matters

Roy Harrover’s 1963 terminal is one of the better mid-century airport buildings still carrying traffic, and the airport authority chose to modernize it rather than start over. That decision buys the region a preserved landmark and hands the construction team a much harder problem. Every package has to be sequenced around live operations, phased so that a passenger crossing the departures hall never sees an open shaft, and the seismic scope adds a structural dimension most terminal renovations never touch.

The cellular concrete infill under an occupied building is the detail worth watching. Airport owners across the central Mississippi Valley carry the same New Madrid exposure and most have not addressed it, largely because nobody wants to close a terminal to do it. Memphis is proving out a method that doesn’t require closing one.

Project Team & Details