program of stansted international airport

As early as 1961, government agencies had identified an abandoned military runway at Stansted as the only logical site for a third London airport.

Other locations remained on the list of possibilities until a 1978 White Paper avowed the immediate need for increased regional flight capacity. In 1979 a plan to expand Stansted from 150,000 passengers per year to 15 million was announced. Controversy over potential environmental impacts led to a public hearing that lasted two years before a compromise plan was announced for phased expansion to 8 million passengers per year.
The client, the British Airport Authority (BAA), owns seven airports in the United Kingdom and manages all or
parts of nine others.
These include terminals in the United States, Australia, and Italy. The BAA Lynton subsidiary is a leading developer of airport locations for office, warehouse, and hotel developments around the world. BAA saw Stansted as an eventual necessity early on.
It began preparing studies for a new terminal building in 1981.
The intent was to have a fast-track plan ready to implement as soon as parliamentary approval was granted. Air traffic was reaching critical levels at London’s Heathrow and Gatwick airports, and any delay in updating Stansted could mean trouble for London air traffic.

Brief
Passenger services at Stansted were differentiated from those at London’s Gatwick and Heathrow airports by slotting it with a collection of budget flights to continental Europe and including some domestic flights.
This strategy was seen by BAA as a method of integrating the total resources of the three London airfields. It also limited the traffic at Stansted by restricting it to the sort of flights that typically do not involve passengers transferring from one flight to another. By 1981 the large terminals at London’s Gatwick and Heathrow airports were already booked to capacity. Total traffic in southeast England airports was approaching 80 million passengers per annum (MPPA), and shortfalls were already being forecast for the early 1990s. Stansted was initially intended to handle about 2 MPPA and grow to 8 million. In a review, the government’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) stated, “There is no alternative.” Somehow, the CAA continued, London airports would have to cope with more than 120 MPPA by 2005, of which Stansted’s share would be about 33 MPPA.
The brief called for phased terminal construction so that growth could be accommodated with minimal disruption to ongoing service. Both airside and landside traffic to the remote location had to be considered
along with the expansion of the terminal and sensitivity to the rural setting.
BAA chairman Sir Norman Payne made it clear that commercial considerations would outweigh architectural ones, but at the same time sought an architect with both the vision and the resources to maximize the result.
BAA prepared six alternative schemes and asked Foster to review them for building merit and to work out the relative costs of each. When Foster came back with his own alternative scheme number seven, he was able to convince BAA’s planners of its superior merit. In January 1981, Foster Associates was given a limited appointment and in September 1984 received a full commission.