Air France ADP T2G terminal paris
The following text is by Jean-Pierre Pujals Project manager for Air France who commisioned me to provide feng shui design advice for this impressive project.
The Terminal Régional T2G is for Companies of the Air France Group : Régional, Brit’Air and City Jet. The traffic is about 120 flights a day, and 3 million passengers per year. It is the sixth largest Airport of France…
At the start of the project, we knew that customers are stressed when they need to take a plane, some because they are a little bit afraid to fly, others because they don’t want to miss the flight.
So we decided that the part of the trip at the airport should be relaxing, safe and easy to do…that’s why we built all the processes around emotions and the way passengers feel.
When you travel all around the world, you notice that many airports are difficult to use, some of them are big and customers often lose their way…how could we improve this?
Design a terminal which is easy to use for everybody
A terminal with its own identity, so that customers remember it.
A terminal where you feel very good, with positive feelings, where you feel at home.
Terminal Régional is dedicated to small planes of less than100 seats, with short flight times, so planes come and go frequently all day.
Flights: lessthan1h30 minutes. Short transit time: 45 minutes 16 flights at the same time, during a 1h30 period.
Therefore this activity produces a lot of stress, for the customers, flight crews and ground staff.
Question : How could we ensure that they feel good ?
Feng Shui must be for everybody, so ground staff offices had been designed implementing its concepts. We studied all the different offices, furniture, sharp corners, colours, floors, materials, to create a special mood…
We believe that when staff feel good at work, they will work better and be more efficient…And so customer services will be better.
And we needed to do something, because of the nature of the activity…
Feng Shui Aims and Objectives
Creating environments and atmospheres for success.
Humans are influences by the atmosphere they are in. Cafes, cathedrals, shops, homes, museums, hotels all have the potential to help us feel differently.
Identify each part of the terminal and how we want passengers and staff to feel there. Then design interiors to create atmospheres that best encourage those feelings.
How Do We Use Feng Shui?
Colours, materials, form, lighting, imagery, signage, natural light.
Simple, obvious, elegant design.
Create atmospheres in terms of soft, hard, fast, slow, relaxed, open, flowing, contained, varied and changeable.
Emotions and feelings –relaxed, secure, calm, confident, engaged, taken care of, stimulated, inspired.
Today we’ve received the first feed back from our customers, and it is very good. All of them told us that it is very easy to find the way to planes and to luggage claim.
The colours and shapes contribute to the creation of special moods, and the customers say they feel so good inside…We have also reduced our ground service costs…and increased our quality…
Feng Shui? Did somebody say Feng Shui…
Jean-Pierre Pujals quote ends.
The big feng shui theme of this terminal is colour. This is achieved through the use of coloured glass. The advantage of coloured glass is that it creates colours on the interior surfaces that move and change through the day.
You can see how the natural light colours the floor of the baggage claim. These lines of colour will move across the floor as the sun moves through the sky, helping the terminal live and breathe with the natural environment.
The photograph below shows the hall from which you enter or leave the plane. The coloured glass windows mean that if a passenger leaves on a flight in the morning the sun shining from the east colours the room orange and when he or she returns in the evening it takes on a greenish blue tone. This helps create a natural, interesting, memorable feature that passengers can look forward to experiencing.
Seats looking out of the windows and a variety of seating help make the departure lounge a homely, relaxing place to wait, shop or have something to eat.
Curves, plants, soft colours, natural materials, information and a variety of flooring make this space interesting whilst providing a variety of atmospheres so passengers can find a place to suit their needs.
The signage has been designed to be clear whilst soft on the eye and relaxing.
This image of a plane taking off guides passengers through the journey of getting through the airport to their plane.
Great effort was put into creating a building in which the flow through is obvious minimising the need for signs and reducing stress.
Walkways can be a boring part of the passenger experience and this walkway has been designed to have an interesting view that makes the journey from departure lounge to plane seem shorter than it is.
A variety of colours, images, sounds, textures and forms can further help in terminal with longer walkways.
A great effort was made to ensure the terminal is easy to use for all and here you can see the special design of the self check-in kiosk to make it easy for passengers in wheel chairs to use.
Thoughtful design get greatly reduce the demands on staff when the building best serves the needs of the people using it.
This allows the staff to focus on the positive side of helping passengers and making each journey through terminal a happy experience. Ultimately this is the test of whether a building has helpful feng shui.