Just looking at the architecture of the airport compared with Charles de Gaulle, Oslo Airport and Shanghai Airport you can see that they all try to get a large surface for their terminals to make space for a lot of aircraft. The BER airport terminal buildings are built in a square, with little obvious room for expansion. I guess they could build in that square which looks like it has nothing in it, but a new and separate terminal building cluster is not optimal either. No, in combination with the fire gas thing it seems like this is the PHP of airports - bad design all around.
