Tidal: A Koh Phangan Airport That Expands on Arrival and Contracts on Departure

Most airports want you to forget them. They are built for throughput, and the best compliment a passenger can pay one is that it got out of the way. Tidal argues the opposite: an airport on a small tropical island should be the first place you meet that island, and the last place you remember it. Its organising idea is the tidal pool, a small basin of water that holds a fragment of the larger sea. Here the terminal becomes a chain of these pools: pockets of landscape, play and rest set into an otherwise efficient passenger sequence.

Designed by Beomi Labio and shortlisted in the First Window competition, the proposal answers a brief to imagine an airport as a "first window" onto Koh Phangan, Thailand. Labio takes the title literally. Instead of a sealed box of gates and retail, the terminal frames the island's climate, materials and pace, and it keeps doing so in both directions of travel.

A Linear Terminal Interrupted by Glimpses of the Island

The elevation and plan show a design that respects how airports actually work. Check-in, security, customs and baggage claim follow a clear linear order, and four aircraft dock along a single gate edge. Labio does not try to break that logic. He punctuates it. Numbered programs sit along the passenger route as deliberate pauses, so the plan reads as one direction of movement with several places to step aside.

The more interesting move is that this sequence behaves differently depending on which way you are travelling. Arriving passengers find these spaces opening up in scale, encouraging exploration and discovery. Departing passengers find the same programs drawn in, more intimate and reflective, a place to look back on the trip. One plan serves as an introduction for some and a farewell for others, and wayfinding stays clear in both cases. Few airport designs consider the emotional asymmetry between arriving and leaving. This one builds it into the plan.

A Plateau Carved for a Tropical Climate

The site plan places the terminal and its four aircraft on a cleared plateau, with contour lines tightening around it and a winding road threading up to the forecourt. The drawing explains the project's restraint. This is a compact, island-scaled facility sitting within its topography, not a sprawling hub that flattens the landscape.

Koh Phangan's conditions shape the response: heavy rainfall, high humidity and strong winds. Labio turns to Thai vernacular architecture for passive strategies, not mechanical ones. The building is designed to move air, admit daylight and shed water, and it uses locally sourced heavy timber and bamboo to keep embodied energy low while storing carbon. These materials also give the terminal a texture that belongs to the island, which matters in a building meant to be a visitor's first impression.

Climbing Walls, Palms and Decks as Tidal Moments

The three circular renderings work like portholes into the tidal pools themselves: a rock climbing wall, a view framed by palms, and an open deck. Beneath them, a sketch of shrinking circles diagrams the arrival-and-departure logic, with each moment widening for newcomers and narrowing for those leaving. The circular frame is a smart graphic choice. It presents each program as a contained world, which is exactly how a tidal pool works within a shoreline.

The full list of insertions goes well beyond the usual airport amenities: aquariums, rock climbing, gardens, spas, daycare and stepped seating. The critique behind them is pointed. Contemporary airports often reduce waiting to passive consumption, with dwell time turned into shopping time. Tidal replaces that with active engagement, offering sensory and spatial variety. Whether every program would survive an operator's spreadsheet is open to debate, but the argument that a terminal can be a destination rather than a holding pen is clearly made.

A Golden Roof That Swells Like a Wave

The dusk rendering shows the project's defining gesture: a golden, undulating roof running the length of the terminal, with the control tower rising beside it and 737s parked on the apron. The curvilinear form draws on the steep, swooping roofs of Thai tradition, and the massing as a whole takes on a wave-like profile, as if the building had been shaped by the same forces that shape the coast.

What saves the roof from being only an image is that it does real work. Its geometry supports natural ventilation, brings daylight deep into the plan and manages heavy tropical rain. That is the right order of priorities for a building in this climate. The metaphor of the tide justifies the form, but the weather justifies the section. Seen from an approaching aircraft, it would also announce the island before passengers ever set foot on it.

Why This Project Matters

Tidal is valuable less for any single feature than for the question it asks: what if an airport were designed around how people feel when they arrive and leave a place? By keeping the linear efficiency that airports depend on and layering a sequence of tidal moments over it, Labio shows that experience and operation do not have to compete. The dual reading of the same spaces, expansive on arrival and intimate on departure, is a genuinely fresh idea in a building type that rarely considers memory.

The project also offers a credible model for small-island aviation. It is compact, passively ventilated, built from local timber and bamboo, and tied to Thai roof traditions without copying them. For a competition that asked designers to treat the airport as a first window, Tidal delivers a terminal that frames Koh Phangan's landscape, climate and pace, and lets visitors take a last look as they leave.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Beomi Labio

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Project credits: Tidal by Beomi Labio First Window (uni.xyz).