Passenger Terminal Expo 2016 Cologne: USM Airportsystems

The Swiss architect Fritz Haller famously developed a space colony as a means to allow him to explore his ideas of architecture in an extreme environment, and thus help him to better understand the possibilities of terrestrial architecture.

To explore Fritz Haller’s USM furniture system in an extreme environment, and thus better understand the wider possibilities, you need go little further than your local airport.

Established in 2011 USM Airportsystems develop, as the name implies, tailored solutions for airports. The combination being logical: if a central, defining, requirement for airport furniture and furnishings is a combination of functionality, flexibility and durability, then the modular and freely configurable USM Haller system makes perfect sense.

Something perhaps best demonstrated by the mobile immigration control trolleys developed by USM Airportsystems in cooperation with Zurich Airport. Faced with a requirement to be able to undertake passport/visa checks at any number of variable gates Zurich Airport needed easily mobile units which provide the immigration officers the functionality to perform their duties: a few USM balls, steel tubes, metal panels and castors later, and 70 such units exist. And should in the future Zurich Airport decide they no longer need such, or at least no longer need so many, the trolleys can be dismantled and rebuilt into other objects that are required.

In addition to Zurich Airport USM Airportsystems have also supplied, amongst other contracts, security screening units for the New Doha International Airport, check-in and gate counters for 46 regional airports in Norway, baggage drop-off counters for Cote D’Azur Airport Marseille and numerous, and ever changing, aviation and non-aviation solutions for Leipzig-Halle Airport, including boarding pass control gates, information desks and lounge furnishings.

And that the USM Haller system’s adaptability is itself adaptable was neatly demonstrated by USM Airportsystems in Cologne with a panel crafted from the proprietary material Corian through which an LED display can be projected and thus allowing display and information systems to be integrated with a USM unit without disrupting the optical unity. And just one of those painfully obvious solutions that makes you wonder why it took so long to realise….

Ever new technological and legal requirements mean that an airport’s demands from much of its furniture is constantly changing, with its modularity and reduced design principle, system USM Haller can adapt to those changes with a minimum of fuss and a minimum of cost.

And not just varying functional demands, also varying visual, styling, demands, “In America it is often the airlines, not the airport, who are responsible for providing their counters”, explains USM Airportsystems CEO Brita Forrest-Hampson, “which can result in an airport looking quite messy and uncoordinated because every airline creates their own counter independent of other operators. With USM each airline can still create its own counter as it requires, but the airport presents a unitary, clearly defined, harmonious, visual impression.”

And of course what is applicable in an airport is equally applicable in the the home, office, shop, surgery, etc, etc, etc…. just a lot less extreme.

A few impressions from USM Airportsystems at Passenger Terminal Expo 2016 in Cologne: