SFO Harvey Milk Terminal 1 Project of the Year: A Terminal Rebuilt Without Closing

The SFO Harvey Milk Terminal 1 Project of the Year title was presented on 5 November 2026, and it rewards stamina as much as style. San Francisco International Airport’s Harvey Milk Terminal 1 earned the Design-Build Institute of America’s highest project honour, the 2026 National Design-Build Project of the Year, for a transformation delivered while the airport kept running, the DBIA announcement reported. Information verified through 14 November 2026.

This was no small field. More than 80 projects were submitted to this year’s National Design-Build Project/Team Awards, an independent jury picked 32 Merit Award winners across 10 market sectors, and nine of those went on to National Awards of Excellence, Airport Improvement reported. Terminal 1 took the top prize anyway.

DBIA’s executive director and CEO, Lisa Washington, put the point plainly in the announcement: the team “transformed a major airport terminal while keeping operations running.” That sentence sounds modest. Read the construction record and it is not.

Harvey Milk Terminal 1 DBIA award 2026 — three more honours on the night

The Harvey Milk Terminal 1 DBIA award 2026 haul did not stop at Project of the Year. The terminal also won the National Award of Excellence in Aviation, plus Best in Design – Architecture and Best in Leadership/Teaming, the announcement said. The Chair’s Award, the night’s other headline honour, went to the Yellowhawk Tribal Health Center in Pendleton, Oregon.

One award is for the building. One is for the sector. One is for how the team worked together. Juries do not hand out that combination for a handsome façade — they hand it out when the delivery method itself becomes part of the design achievement.

Hensel Phelps lists the same national honours on its project page, alongside a regional Project of the Year title and a Prix Versailles listing. Different juries keep landing on the same project.

Harvey Milk Terminal 1 progressive design-build rebuild — nine years, at least nine gates open

The Harvey Milk Terminal 1 progressive design-build rebuild began in July 2016 and was completed in July 2025, a $1.53-billion, 900,000-square-foot effort to remove the old Terminal 1 while building its replacement in the same footprint, ENR reported. SFO operates around the clock. Operations went uninterrupted.

How? Phasing, mostly, and a lot of night work. The team, led in design by Gensler with Kuth Ranieri Architects, demolished and rebuilt in stages while keeping at least nine gates operating, ENR said. Hensel Phelps describes the same sequence from its side: Phase 1 demolished half the arrivals, departures and mezzanine levels and rebuilt them from the ground up, Phase 1A opened a new TSA checkpoint in July 2019 to support nine new gates, and Phase 1B opened half the new terminal in June 2020 before Phase 2 took on the second half, the firm’s project page said.

The awkward bits were buried. Crews built a 1,200-foot underground utilidor to hold much of the new baggage system, micro-phased the mechanical, electrical, plumbing and fire-protection work, and planned intrusive jobs for nights and off-peak hours, ENR reported. Hazardous material turned up in the old fabric. So did a pandemic, midway through. Gary Brandau, senior design manager at Hensel Phelps, told ENR the terminal “had to be fully demolished and rebuilt while maintaining continuous airport operations, requiring an exceptionally coordinated and resilient delivery approach.”

What passengers got for that patience is concrete enough: a new check-in lobby, TSA checkpoints, hold rooms, baggage claim, a secure connector to Boarding Area C and the International Terminal, a mezzanine with direct access to the AirTrain and central garage, and support for 25 gates, ENR reported. The baggage system is the first Independent Carrier System at a U.S. airport, each bag tracked by radio-frequency identification in its own tote, Hensel Phelps said.

SFO Terminal 1 quiet airport design — calm as a specification

The SFO Terminal 1 quiet airport design is deliberate. Gensler describes T1 as a “quiet terminal” that minimises overhead announcements in favour of digital displays, with naturally lit spaces, gender-neutral restrooms, wellness zones and accessible wayfinding, in its account of the terminal’s earlier Prix Versailles World Title in Aviation. That jury praised a “soothing, restorative setting for travelers” and cited a 79% reduction in carbon emissions and a 59% decrease in energy usage.

Gensler also says the terminal, designed for 17 million passengers a year, is the first worldwide to hold LEED v4 Platinum, WELL Core Platinum and Fitwel certifications at the same time, and that it houses a permanent SFO Museum exhibition honouring Harvey Milk alongside more than 30 commissioned artworks, the firm reported. Hensel Phelps makes a narrower version of the energy claim, saying the building uses 60% less energy than comparable facilities, the firm said. The figures come from different baselines. The direction does not change.

Named for civil rights leader Harvey Milk, the terminal is the first in the world named for an LGBTQ+ leader, and its central inglenook carries an exhibit on his life, Hensel Phelps said. That is not decoration bolted onto an airport. It is the programme: Bay Area food and shops, local art, daylight, quiet.

Analysis: airports usually get praised for speed — shorter queues, faster bags, quicker turns. This one keeps winning for the opposite quality. Restraint. A team spent nine years tearing down and rebuilding a terminal in public, gate by gate, and the finished place is known for being calm. If the DBIA result travels, the lesson for other airports will not be a shape to copy. It will be a method: co-locate the team, phase the pain, and treat a passenger’s nerves as a design material, same as steel or glass.

Photo: Harvey Milk Terminal 1 at San Francisco International Airport, by Frank Schulenburg, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Sources

1. https://www.buildingenclosureonline.com/articles/95310-sfo-harvey-milk-terminal-1-named-2026-dbia-project-of-the-year
2. https://www.enr.com/articles/63990-sfo-terminal-1-caps-decade-long-rebuild
3. https://www.henselphelps.com/project/san-francisco-international-airport-sfo-harvey-milk-terminal-1/
4. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/12/10/3203100/0/en/Harvey-Milk-Terminal-1-at-San-Francisco-International-Airport-Wins-Prix-Versailles-World-Title.html
5. https://airportimprovement.com/article/sfo-harvey-milk-terminal-1-named-2026-dbia-project-of-the-year/