The Tomsk airport is situated a couple of dozen kilometers away from the city, near the settlement of Bogashevo. The construction of the international terminal was planned still in 2004, when the city celebrated its 400th anniversary, but at that point the city only managed to modernize the building of the old terminal and the adjacent plaza. International flights began flying from Tomsk in 2013, and since then passenger traffic has been steadily growing: almost 800 thousand people live in the Tomsk urban agglomeration alone, and the airport serves other cities as well. In 2019, large-scale work finally began: reconstruction of the runway, repair of access roads and construction of a new terminal by the project of Asadov bureau. The expected area of the facility is 7000 square meters; after the construction is finished, the total area of both Tomsk terminals will be 17,300 square meters.

The terminal’s client is the Novaport company, Russia’s largest chain of regional airports, working with which ASADOV bureau designed and built facilities in Perm and Kemerovo.

A regional airport is the typology, in which nowadays it is fashionable to “crank up” the identity to very high levels, and all this in spite of the fact that the terminals are oftentimes located in a windswept field or in an industrial area – but then again, the absence of immediate context leaves more freedom for flashy accents. It is a place where it is appropriate to tell the guests and remind the residents about the things that the city has to offer.

In Tomsk, the architects proceeded from the name of the airport: in 2018, it was named after Nikolai Kamov – the aircraft designer, founder of the Soviet helicopter industry, who coined the word “vertolet” that is now used in the modern Russian language instead of the English “helicopter”. Under the leadership of Nikolai Kamov and Mikhail Mil, the production of the world-famous helicopters “Ka” and “Mi” began. Nikolai Kamov studied in Tomsk; he entered the Institute of Technology at the age of 16. One cannot say that the engineer’s ideas are reflected in the building in any literal way – and at the same time it is obvious that they were the source of inspiration.

The new terminal is situated on the left of the old one and has a plan that is very close to a perfect square – the volume is technology-determined and was set well in advance, so ASADOV bureau worked on breathing architecture into this parallelepiped.