Twenty-one metres of glass on a cyclone coast: inside the Bhogapuram terminal
From the air, the terminal at Alluri Sitarama Raju International Airport in Bhogapuram is a fish. The roof runs as one long silver shell, ribbed
From the air, the terminal at Alluri Sitarama Raju International Airport in Bhogapuram is a fish. The roof runs as one long silver shell, ribbed into bays that ripple front to back the way gill slits do on the underside of a ray, and it flings out a pier to carry the aerobridges, so the plan reads as a fish: check-in in the belly, gates in the tail. Built against a storm The shape GMR took from the sea. The reason they took from a storm. On October 12, 2014, Cyclone Hudhud came ashore at Visakhapatnam with three-minute sustained winds of 185 kmph, flooded the present Visakhapatnam International (INS Dega) airport, peeled the roof off the terminal and smashed the radar. Civil flights had stopped a day earlier as the storm closed in; the building was patched back into service inside a week. Every choice at Bhogapuram answers that week. Hon'ble Prime Minister Shri @narendramodi ji will inaugurate the Alluri Sitarama Raju International Airport at Bhogapuram on 1st August. The Greenfield airport marks a major step towards strengthening aviation infrastructure, enhancing regional connectivity, and accelerating… pic.twitter.com/FEONc5yUav — G Kishan Reddy (@kishanreddybjp) July 28, 2026 GMR Visakhapatnam International Airport Limited told The Hindu the new terminal “was designed to withstand severe cyclonic conditions, and it can sustain wind speeds of up to 275 kmph and heavy rainfall of up to 27 centimetres, with a drainage system built to handle extreme weather.” The claim runs well above the Indian code, which puts this coast in its highest wind band, about 198 kmph, and adds a cyclone factor written in after 2014 that lifts the design figure to roughly 257 kmph.
The place to feel those numbers is the glass. Twenty-one metres of it, floor to roof, without a break, on a shore with this history. Writing in WFM Media in July 2026, Rajan Govind, Director of BES Consultants, which engineered the facade, said the glazing spans run from 12 m to 21 m and are designed for wind loads of 5.5 to 5.75 kilopascals, that ordinary cladding fixings would not hold at those loads, and that the team turned to bolt-and-nut systems, reinforced the critical panels with perimeter frames, and pinned the tops of the connections so the roof can move in a gale without taking the glass with it. An upturned grove under glass There is a lot of ornament, and the best of it hangs under the oval. From the skylight droop a shoal of discs, 27 or so, held at different heights on thin stems, each spoked with radial ribs, some printed in cream, rose, slate and grey, others left as open mesh so the light falls through one onto the next. The effect is of Singapore’s supertree grove turned over and hung indoors under glass. Stand beneath them and they are parasols. Muggulu motif The line that binds the building is drawn on the ground in Andhra households every morning.
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