Have a look at this [0] as an example airport where there are no ducts or fans at high level. The skylights are probably automatically controlled to vent smoke using stack effect only and the undulating roof will act as a smoke reservoir to contain smoke in one structural bay.

>The smoke ventilation system was originally designed to rely on fans to blow the smoke downwards in the ventilation shafts. As far as I know, nobody had tried to build a system like this before. Rumor has it that ventilation pipes even imploded during a test.

Well I do know of places where this has been done. It's not as failsafe as having a duct which relies on the stack effect but you have additional fans and redundant power supplies etc to make sure the system does not fail. Also the fans suck air through the system to the smoke extract outlet point as you want the pressure inside the duct to be lower than inside the building otherwise you risk blowing smoke into other parts of the building. Ducts imploding sounds like a problem with smoke dampers not activating correctly. Confusion about which dampers should be operating would be caused by a big last minute change to the layout of the spaces inside the building, which brings me back to wondering if it was because they introduced a lot more shopping area where there was none before because this is a classic last minute change in airport design that has caused problems with other airports. Big changes to space utilisation are going to cause delays and budget overruns once you have got passed the concept sketch stage.

> One escalator turned out to be too short when delivered. Instead of fixing the escalator, they extended it by adding regular stairs to the end.

Would be a major and obvious crowd safety problem and a contravention of regulations in many countries, I am assuming this would also be the case in a well regulated country like Germany. Which is why I find it hard to believe that this would be installed, rather than sent back to the factory and extended.

It's a question of managing expectations, every building is a prototype and loads of things go wrong all the time. I have heard of all the problems you describe happening on other projects for both public and private sector clients, they were just fixed and everything carried on. What you are describing has details that don't sound technically correct, so it seems like there is someone out there running a smear campaign to deflect blame from whoever made the big change to the brief, which makes me curious to know what the truth is.

For government clients airports are adverts for cities and a symbol of municipal pride so they like something that is spectacular, but private sector clients want a shopping mall with passengers winding through intestine like corridors full of shops on their way to the airplanes parked outside. Changing from one model to the other halfway through is not going to be a smooth process.

A major brief change or an unclear starting brief is what causes building (and software) projects to go late and over budget, not lots of little things like what you are describing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolfo_Suárez_Madrid–Barajas_A...