O'Hare International Airport — New Concourse D (ORDNext)

A 195-foot tower crane now stands in the middle of O’Hare’s airfield, and not one foot of FAA pavement closed to put it there.

Concourse D is the first building delivered under ORDNext, the largest expansion in the airport’s 68-year history. The Chicago Department of Aviation locked a guaranteed maximum price of $1.455 billion with the AECOM Hunt Clayco Bowa joint venture in June 2026, roughly $21 million under the approved budget. Completion is targeted for late 2028.

Project Scope

Nineteen narrow-body gates, 18 of which convert into nine wide-body positions. Three levels, 73 feet tall. The City puts the building at roughly 580,000 square feet; designer SOM’s own project page lists 901,822 square feet of gross area, a gap worth resolving before anyone quotes a cost per square foot.

The structural move is a set of branching tree columns carrying a 150-foot-wide long-span roof, a nod to O’Hare’s original name, Orchard Field. The long span cuts interior columns by about half. Inside: more than 20,000 square feet of lounge space, 30,000 square feet of retail and dining, a suspended international arrivals corridor separating arriving and departing flows, and a central domed node with an oculus that receives passengers from the Concourse C bridge and, later, from a tunnel to the planned O’Hare Global Terminal.

SOM leads design with Ross Barney Architects and JGMA, Arup on MEP and Rubinos & Mesia on structure, backed by Milhouse, Terra Engineering, Gannett Fleming, BNP Associates, Atelier Ten, Jensen Hughes and RWDI. Delivery is construction manager at risk.

Why It Matters

Groundbreaking was August 18, 2025. Vertical construction started April 23, 2026 with about 35% of foundations and more than 90% of caissons complete. A new central cooling facility sized for all future ORDNext development started the same spring, alongside airfield paving and utility work.

All of it happens inside an operating airfield. Two interim taxiways, Tango and Romeo, had to be built and commissioned west of the site because the rising structure breaks FAA line of sight to existing taxiways. A 1.5-mile, 14.5-foot-diameter tunnel was mined under live pavement to move stormwater from the central detention basin to an expanded south basin, freeing the central basin to be backfilled with spoil from the concourse excavation and paved over for two new taxiways.

Enabling work started in 2018. Seven years of it bought a jobsite where the airport keeps running.

Project Team & Details