“It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced
the expression ‘As pretty as an airport.'”
— 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. Most airports are still like that, and are in fact still the same airports, only bigger. London Heathrow and Sydney (Kingsford Smith) are two classic examples of this sort. It is questionable whether they are in sensible locations, there is no space and any attempt to further expand them is highly controversial, and they are not noted for their architecture.
However, new airports do not have to be like this. In the last couple of decades a new way of building a really large airport has come into being, which has been to build an airport with very large capacity (designed for 20 million passenger throughput a year or more) from scratch, on a large greenfield site. (Yes, there have always been new airports built on greenfield sites, this kind of large scale new project appears to be becoming more common). This has either been because the old airport was to be closed (as in Hong Kong or Denver), because the capacity of the existing airport was woefully inadequate (as in Osaka) or because it was understood that there would be a lot of expansion in the future (as at London Stansted). In each case a whole new airport has been built from scratch, the physical area for the airport has been larger (even if an artificial island had to be built to make the area, as in the case of Osaka and (sort of) Hong Kong), and a team of world class architects and designers has been put together to design the airport. This has led to airport terminals that have won architectural awards, such as Norman Foster’s terminals at Stansted and Hong Kong, and Renzo Piano’s at Osaka. (Of the last three links, the “Osaka” one leads to the best pictures). These airports are aesthetically pleasing.
Building a giant airport from scratch is perhaps akin to building a 19th century railway terminal from scratch. You look at the whole picture, build something monumental in style, and some of the results (St Pancras station in London, for instance) are beautiful as a consequence. On the other hand, build one platform, and then add new lines and sheds to cover them nearby, and what you end up with is less likely to be pretty.
And this seems to have changed the whole attitude to the building of airport terminals. People seem to be trying to build something nice, even when expanding an old, functional and ugly airport. The new terminal five at Heathrow is going to be a lovely spiffy building designed by Richard Rogers. Certainly the extension to the international terminal in Sydney that was completed prior to the Olympics was better than what was there before.
Despite the opposition of my other esteemed colleague Natalie Solent, London Stansted is going to get a new runway and a new terminal in the next few years. This will be the first instance I can think of in which a new airport with an architecturally acclaimed terminal being massively expanded. The question is what the new terminal will look like, and what the whole airport will look like with it. One possibility is that Norman Foster could be hired again to produce another terminal in keeping with the first one, or it could be possible to hire another architect to produce something nice but from a slightly later architectural era. In time, we might end up with something architecturally akin to an Oxbridge college, with architecture from different periods and movements, most but not all of it of considerable merit, sitting together and interoperating. This would be interesting. (You could argue that something a little like this has happend at O’Hare in Chicago already, where each new terminal seems to be architecturally better than the ones that preceded it).
However, the second issue is simply that large scale building of airports and carparks coincided with the moment when concrete and other “modern” materials started being used in large quantities in architecture, and architecture started producing concrete monstrosities in response to any commission. The improvement in airport architecture also corresponds to an improvement in the architecture of museums, skyscrapers, and buildings of most other kinds. We haven’t perhaps got there yet on carparks, but if this is the explanation, we might. We are definitely getting there on shopping malls, and carparks are fairly integrally linked to those.
Of course the other possibility is that new airports are being built by a secret conspiracy of the Germans, the Queen of England, the Freemasons, the Skull and Bones secret society, the CIA, Darth Vader, the IRS, the International Jewish Conspiracy, and no doubt others, who are all working together as the New World Order, and the architecture is some part of their sinister plot to take over the world. But that would perhaps be farfetched. (Sorry, I found that when I was googling to research this post, and couldn’t help but link to it. And by the way, is the owner of that site aware that “DIA” also stands for “Defence Intelligence Agency”? That’s a dead giveaway, surely. I’m not sure of quite what, but it must be something.)
I’m curious
In what way was Stansted Future Proofed?
Eamon
forgive my rudeness, oh fellow scribes, but, er, isn’t this topic a bit boring?
Fascinating… I seem to have invented a phrase that is now in common usage. I wordsmithed “Future proofing” for a NASA SBIR proposal back in 1989-90 and introduced it over here via proposal to IDB in Northern Ireland and I’ve been watching it spread ever since…
Oh, yeah… the topic at hand. There were some really handsome terminal buildings built in the 30’s. A few are still standing and are listed even where the runways are long gone.
Big respect to you then dale.
It’s a fine phrase. Simple, elegant and precise in its meaning.
Well done sir
Eamon
Eamon: principally by being in a large space with plenty of room for expansion.
Jonathan: It’s related to the question of what our cities look like, and why they look that way. I find this question to be fascinating, personally. If readers here don’t find it interesting, I will take it to a more specialised blog.
And what can I say? Dale is cool. But we knew that.
Johnathan:
No.
You are confusing the present state of a lot of the buildings being referred to with the claim that therefore saying that these buildings need not be boring is itself boring. (See also my original posting on car parks, which makes the same point.)
The Osaka link is particularly fine, I think.
Also worth mention is Washington Dulles airport, probably one of the first modern greenfield sites, and one of the first postwar terminals designed with aesthetics in mind. Saarinen’s design works even today, despite a substantial expansion. Except for his “mobile lounge” concept, which quickly was overwhelmed by growth of traffic far in excess of expectation.
I have a peculiar loathing, not of flying per se, but of airports. I almost feel physically ill when I am in one, whether I am flying or picking up a friend. If I am flying, I feel much better as soon as I am on the plane.
Of course, the airports I have been to are all in Australia or New Zealand, and all of them are pretty diabolical from an architecural point of view.
On behalf of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy™ I’d like to deny any involvement with the new Denver airport.
Airports are supposed to be promising, not pretty. The there and not the here.
Part of the reason that airports are so ugly is the time frame they were built in.
The Pre-WWII ones were small locations, for (by and large) small aircraft for eccentric or rich people taking an elite & very expensive mode of transport.
After WWII we had the BIG expansion, the ship-liners driven out of business, suddenly airtravel was middle class, and everybody needed and airport, etc…
Take a look at the barren architectural desert that is *most* the post war period design inthe west , why should airports have been any different? Especially because they were built by governments or quasi-government bureaucracies.
Had large airports been built pre WWI we would have had superb terminals inthe architecture of the period.
Here in North America you have only to look at the (private!) RR Stations they built. (old) Pennsylvannia and Central in NYC, Washington DC’s, all of them stylish, attractive, durable.
Fred
I like my airports functional: fast processing in and out. On this basis Chek Lap Kok wins out of the major airports I frequent. Also the MTR subway is quicker into Hong Kong than a taxi. Many airports are hours from the city centre – Tokyo forinstance is nearly 2 hours.
All large airports seem to be similar, curvy high roofs characterise the current crop.
Lord Foster is no Brunel, its all much of a muchness with his creations – which I understand are usually the produce of his junior partners.
Incidentally, why are we discussing airport architecture?
I’ve never been to a carpark where I had to wait two hours, be searched, and show a passport to two bunches of officials before being allowed to travel from it.
Even bus stations seem to be free of that sort of thing (or were the last time I travelled by bus).
Architecture, and style, seem to be a favorite (favourite 🙂 topics for libertarians for some reason. Even though our house/apartment/flat/condo may not be stylish, and our clothes slovnely (I even have a t-shirt that says 404: /shirt/tie: Not Found), we still have an eye for style.
For architecure, I never really started paying attention to it until I finished _The Fountainhead_ – and then I started paying attention, and even took an Art History class in college because of it.
After following Michael’s link to the moonbat preserve, I must say that I find it very suspicious that there would be a Masonic symbol on cut building stone. When Masons work with masonry, it is clearly a sign that the end days are upon us.
Oh, and if DIA is the center of the secret world government, the secret world government really needs to replace its HR department.
Of course, there’s always THIS
I think architecture is fascinating actually – and a major part of what makes people feel good or bad about their lives [whether they realise or not].
And Fred hits the nail on the head. Airports and carparks are built in a period of history where ugly buildings were/are thought to be cool. International-Style puritanism [much of it bogus and dishonest in my view] is still the court style among big planners, but ordinary people never liked it and never will.
Modern architecture is a kind of ironic/defiant [and quasi-socialist, whatever Ayn Rand thought] factory aesthetic which became deeply embarrassed after Adolf Loos about decoration. It’s a daily reminder to people who have to do factory-style jobs of what they don’t like about their lives, and is doomed, I increasingly think, to be viewed by our descendants as one of the great oddities of art history.
Airports are better commissions than carparks for architects because they are bigger, have to be covered buildings, and get visited by international visitors to cities, making them gateway/signature projects. So higher profile and lots more money.
And even if they are a lot like ugly carparks only larger, people still feel a bit excited flying in an aeroplane off to an exotic country for a summer holiday, and transfer a little of that feeling of excitement to even the dullest of airport buildings. Even for us, giant rooms with enormous unsupported ceilings and vast glass walls showing lots of flags and dinky aeroplanes trundling around outdoors raises a little thrill.
Airports are one of the few modern-architecture building types where there is even a vague point to having a glass wall at all. Few other buildings have anything even half as interesting as a bunch of planes, grass and some nice open sky to look at through their big glass walls. The lucky ones can have a big glass wall looking out at a more attractive facing building built in a previous century, but they’re rare now.
Last and worst, airports are not built around people but around aeroplanes, and so have ridiculously long, tiring corridors, and pointless hall after pointless hall. Since modern architecture was never very friendly to what people actually want from buildings, big projects paid for by a glory-seeking committee of bureaucrats is the ideal commission for a modern architect. People are subordinated to the transport mode even more strongly than at railway termini and shipping ports, so no-one will notice what a shoddy design job the architect did with an airport. It’s a place where the users are bullied by people in uniform, ordered around and processed down mile-long corridors like conveyor-belt fodder. The users are even lower-status and more disregarded than with blocks of flats or offices, and are only around once or twice a year, when they’re worried and in a hurry and constantly harried for their papers, so are in no position to criticise the building’s shortcomings.
The perfect uncomplaining victims for a modern architect.
The new terminal in the Sacramento airport is lovely and, as it has two wings, is based on the two rivers that join in the city. Everything in the terminal is designed to make waiting for a relative or friend downright pleasant, including a musical sculpture which is activated by dancing on the floor tiles. (Weird thought: I have no idea what the outside of the buildings looks like even though I’ve been there…)
What is unfortunate is that all of this lovely architecture became suddenly underutilized after September 11th… virtually all of the amenities and beauty lie beyond the security gates.
Comparing an airport and a parking garage hardly seems fair. Their scale and intensity of use are so enormously different.
One could just as easily ask “Why are airports more interesting than strip malls?”
I’ve never noticed Stansted being particularly interesting.
Munich had an old (actually not that old – mid-90s) boring shed and they’ve just built a new terminal which is much bigger white boring shed, but with a fantastic and very impressive half open air glass atrium between the two.
What little is left of the buildings of the former Munich airport (now an exhibition centre) looks quite nice in a 1930s art deco not-too-Nazi-influenced sort of way too.
Well, there was one airport built over 40 years ago where the architects tried to make a statement: Charles de Gaulle outside Paris (more specifically, the building that is now Terminal 1). People flying through it have cursed its name ever since.
I wonder if the miserable experience of CDG served as a cautionary tale to those with creative ideas. Personally, I’d take a boring concrete block over CDG anytime.