Airport designers are designing the kernel of a future city

Hugh Pearman has articles in the Sunday Times and Wallpaper* magazine this month, both of which mention his new book Airports: A Century of Architecture, which looks essential.

From 'Architecture of Airports', in the Sunday Times:

It is the only single building type I have so far wanted to devote a book to. This is for two reasons. First, the international airport terminal has become, strategically, the most important building type in the world. They are also landmark structures, just as much as any Getty or Guggenheim museum. Second, they are not really buildings at all. An airport is a multipurpose fragment of townscape that is forever wanting to join forces with the real, older city. Airports, because they are such huge economic generators, spawn complete districts, industrial estates, hotel enclaves, transport interchanges. Design an airport and — as those living near Stansted are now discovering — you are designing the kernel of a future town or city.

[...] An airport means more than trade. It means power and constant anxiety. They are modern versions of the medieval fortified seaport, which handled large volumes of trade and throughput of strangers while simultaneously defending itself.

[... The] challenge is for real architects to do what the magic dust of movies can do: make airports more human. That means thinking of them as real villages, towns and cities, not isolated holding pens. It is a tough challenge for the airport architects and designers of the 21st century.

In 'Air Style' in Wallpaper*, he identifies four paradoxes of airports: that their buildings are often less permanent than the aircraft they serve, though his claim that they're also more tinkered with than the 747s they serve ("airports have spawned buildings like some demented Archigram vision of the Plug-in City") isn't perhaps as clear-cut a case as he wishes; that airports work at two speeds, the glacially slow and the panic-inducingly fast - with the result that

it processes you, demands strict timetabling, engenders stress - and then it pens you in, and gives you hours between check-in and take-off in which to do nothing very much, even if there are no delays. So it is a servant building - full of ancillary stuff like cafes and shops, begging your custom - that is also a master building, a place that organises important, technocratic things and orders you about at the double.

- the airport as neurographic zone, offering diversionary, supplementary activities to mask the tectonic delays designed into its master flow plan. Paradox three: that airports are effectively city-states rather than clusters of buildings. Hence paradox four, that:

airports must be both intensely private and intensely public spaces; as secure as they can possibly be, while also allowing the whole world to pass through. Heathrow, Schiphol and LAX airports today are thus rather like Venice in the 17th century, strongholds that somehow double as free-trading airports.

He speculates about the future of airports: low-cost airlines dying out as taxes rise and environmental legislation become more onerous, fewer giant international airports as demand plateaus, and a new breed of regional airports serving medium-cost airlines. But how about West Edmonton, Bluewater and the other mega-malls turning the game on its head and sprouting their own airports and airlines in order to ferry shoppers in to their shopping-cities, and in between their giga-carparks and their many hundred shops? Or IKEA.

The Sunday Times article includes comments on Spielberg's new film The Terminal (IMDB), which is very loosely based on the bizarre story of Merhan Kerim Nasseri, who has lived/been stranded in Paris CDG for 10+ years (Russ Coffey went to visit Nasseri in June).

Related:

• A version on Pearman's site, possibly longer than the Sunday Times article: The Terminal: not just a Spielberg movie but architecture at extremes
• And Pearman again on the new Wembley stadium and the Olympics
• Brian Boyer's Invisible Airports
• The Airport of Crossed Destinies. And Ballard, passim.
• and: in the Guardian, more on Nasseri: The man who lost his past

[via Hamish]

Comments

[Phil Gyford]

On TV a couple of weeks back there was a documentary about people who leave everything behind - walk off and don't call their family/friends. One young guy went to Heathrow (I think) and lived there for a long time - months I think, maybe more. He made it sound like quite a few people live in these places - an area would become popular for various reasons but before long security would cotton on and folks would move on. As he emphasised, unlike normal homeless folks, you need to maintain a certain level of cleanliness in order to blend in with the travellers.