When art marries an airport: Mumbai's T2 ready to take off on Friday

Mumbai’s much-anticipated newly integrated Terminal 2 at Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport, which will be inaugurated this Friday by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, will not only house the world’s most visited museum but alsohas 226,000 sq ft of retail space offering everything that money can buy and over 53,000 sq ft of landscape, with giant waterfalls .

According to a report in The Times of India ,T2 will house some of the best of Indian art and craft to foreign visitors as well as Indians.Somewherebetween the check-in and baggage claim, themuseumwill showcase nearly 7,000 artefacts on a 3km long art wall with works by over 1,500 artists.

In fact, the art wallsnamed Jaya He are something no other airport in the world can boast of.

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The scale of the project is staggering, with an installation of terracotta horses, totems and other historic finds in T2’s departure area covering an area of 80,000 sq ft. Along an 18m high and 1.2km-long wall in the arrivals corridor will be a display of commissioned works by noted Indian artists.

The swanky new airport willcover 439,000 sq m and will be able to accommodate 40 million passengers per year, domestic and international combined. T2 will initially serve international flights with domestic operations to be added later.It will offer over 21,000sq m of retail, food & beverage and other consumer services, including core duty free.

A report in The Business Standard says passengers can drop off their luggage bag on the conveyor belt right at the terminal gate, thereby making trolleys redundant. The first scan of the baggage will be done right at the gate and if the system detects a foreign object in a bag, robotic arms will pick the bag up and isolate it.

Also, the distancee from the boarding gates to the check-in hall is a mere 450 m, which is way shorter that Indira Gandhi International’s (IGI) T3’s 750 metres.

The airport also includesnew taxiways and apron areas for parking that are designed to cater to 40 million passengers annually.Connected by an elevated road, T2 is scheduled to open for international flights by January 15, and later this year for domestic flyers.

The showstopper, however, is the airport’s roof which has been inspired by the dance of 1,000 peacocks. The roof also has skylights, which are made for transmitting sunlight into the terminal.

Experts involved with the design of the airport told DNA that the roof, spanning 11 acres, is considered an engineering feat and has been embedded with special dichroic lenses that move in accordance with the sun’s movement, reflecting on to the check-in hall flooring an array of colours reminiscent of a peacock feather.