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Sometimes, the gods of the internet just give you a gift.
Yeah, I want to take advice on efficiency from these guys. August 1st, 2003 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul (1988). My esteemed colleague Brian Micklethwait yesterday made another post about the architecture of car parks: why are they so ugly and beneath contempt from an architectural point of view, and does this always have to be so? I left a comment saying that airport terminals had been similarly regarded about 15 years ago (as the Adams quote indicates) but were now plumb jobs for architects and perhaps carparks could go the same way, and Brian followed up further in his culture blog. But the focus was still mainly on carparks, and there is lots more to say about airport terminals. I can think of two reasons why the attitudes to their architecture might have changed in the last decade or two. The first probably does not also apply to carparks. The second probably does. One reason is the nature in which airports have changed. Large scale airports did not really exist before the second world war. After it, however, it was clear that every city needed one. Few cities had any idea how large they would ultimately end up being, and in most cities they kind of grew organically. You had a large patch of dirt on which aeroplanes landed, and you built a tin shed next to it to use as a terminal. As planes got bigger and passenger numbers got greater, the runways were paved and got longer, and the tin sheds were demolished and replaced with larger tin sheds, or (worse) they were slowly extended into larger, higgledy piggledy style buildings. Airports expanded physically, nearby houses were demolished, and airports just kind of grew, without much coherent planning. Because airport architecture was held in such low regard, and because what existed already was so awful, little effort was made to make the buildings any more than functional. Also, because in many cases nobody had any idea how big the airport was going to be when it was originally established, in many cases space was at a premium. This led to cramped, constrained buildings. → Continue reading: Why are airports more interesting than carparks? August 1st, 2003 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
You know, some days I wake up and I despair. Samizdata is filled with a waterfall of stories because we’re living in one of the most dangerous hate-filled ages of humanity, festooned with statists, hatists and ecologists. The world is awash with these idiots, fools, and destroyers of the human spirit. But then… But then on other days I know, I feel it in my bones, from the smile on my son’s face, that we will emerge triumphant from this gathering gateway of horror. Oh I pray, I pray to the atheistic God I worship, that a saviour will come to free us from this tyranny. And then I realise that we don’t need a God, and we don’t need a saviour. The spirit is within us all. This is the spirit of freedom, the spirit of adventure, and the spirit of hope. It has sustained us since we crawled out of Africa one hundred thousand years ago, the product of four billion years of evolution. It has sustained us through four thousand bitter years of recorded history, and it has sustained us throughout that most terrible of centuries, the twentieth century of socialism, fascism, and communism. We will not let these people destroy us; we will not let these people crush us underfoot. We will defeat them. We will free them from the horror which wraps their minds. Yes, the past and the present belong to them, my friends, and may belong to them for a few more years yet. But. The future? The future, be assured. The future belongs to us. August 1st, 2003 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
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