Nobody likes airports if they are delayed there. Which means nobody likes London’s Heathrow, and particularly not on those occasions, as now, when British Airways loses the plot. Never mind getting off the ground — at Heathrow, it can also take hours for your plane to find a parking slot on the return journey. No wonder they are now building Richard Rogers’s enormous, bureaucratically delayed new Terminal 5 just as fast as they can. But we’ll still have to wait until 2008 for that to open.
Yet airport terminals can be the most exciting places on earth. When efficiency of operation is combined with the best archi- tecture going, then these usually indeterminate places become something other than vessels of anxiety and boredom. They allow us, for a while, to indulge in a fantasy of futurism.
International airports are the closest thing we have to the science-fiction dream of the city of tomorrow. Fully enclosed, climate- controlled, self-sufficient, with a resident population of workers in a variety of novelty uniforms and specialist vehicles, run by invisible controllers who monitor everybody round the clock — these places are modern-day city-states, benevolent dictatorships that can only too easily turn nasty. Yet the best examples fully embody Le Corbusier’s famous definition of architecture as “the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light”.
Consider, from recent times, Norman Foster’s Stansted and Hong Kong; Kisho Kurokawa’s Kuala Lumpur; Paul Andreu’s Paris Charles de Gaulle, in all its phases; and Renzo Piano’s Kansai. Richard Rogers’s Heathrow T5 and new terminal at Madrid’s Barajas also look promising. Go back to the start of the jet age and you find Eero Saarinen’s Wash- ington Dulles and TWA terminal at JFK, and Vilhelm Lauritzen’s Copenhagen. From the propeller-driven 1930s, you have Ernst Sagebiel’s classical Berlin Tempelhof, the art deco of Liverpool Speke and New York’s La Guardia, and the streamlined moderne of Paris Le Bourget, now an air museum. This is all architecture of the highest order: Paris Charles de Gaulle, for instance, remains a huge achievement, despite the deadly mystery of a small new part of it collapsing earlier this year.
The idea of the airport as a place of potential splendour and fruitful encounter is fully understood by Steven Spielberg. His latest film, The Terminal, stars Tom Hanks as the bewildered but resourceful Viktor Navorski, a visitor forced to live at New York’s JFK for months because his country became politically unacceptable while he was in transit. Spielberg makes his airport as much of a character as any of the humans who inhabit it. Like the exhibition-centre Paris of Jacques Tati ’s Traffic or the Wessex of Hardy’s novels, the backdrop becomes an intrinsic part of the action.
Spielberg’s JFK is not the real place, or even a close replica, but a set built at huge expense in a hangar in California. The pro- duction designer, Alex McDowell, came up with a full-size, fully operational terminal, deliberately made just slightly more terminal-istic than the real thing. Its surfaces are just a bit shinier and more brittle; it has more escalators and flight-information screens, a state-of-the-art Dutch-designed signage system, a veritable kasbah of shops and cafes, and the inevitable section undergoing rebuilding. In order to function convincingly, it had to be built as a real, three- storey building rather than as a flimsy set. Complete with 60,000 square feet of granite floors and 35 well-known retailers, some with real Starbucks-style staff, it took 20 weeks and 200 workers to build. No virtual reality for Spielberg here — what you see, apart from spliced-in scenes of planes pulling up outside, is physical actuality. As love interest Catherine Zeta-Jones remarked: “It even smelt like an airport.” Spielberg lights it such that, at first, it seems hard and alien, then, gradually, it becomes a warmer, more human place. They should try him on the real thing.
As it happens, I have a book on airport architecture coming out shortly, so I have been living and breathing the places for a while.
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.
Airports have come to symbolise progress, freedom, trade and the aspirations of their host nations on the world stage. Also noise, pollution and fear. Airports are hated and opposed by the very people who demand and use cheap flights. Not for nothing did the poet Stephen Spender, in the early 1930s, describe the area around an airfield as “the landscape of hysteria”. No wonder the novelist Rex Warner, in his 1941 allegorical novel The Aerodrome, used the remorseless growth of a military airfield, which takes over an old English village, as a paradigm for the rise of Nazism.
Were Warner to write his novel today, he would find rich source material in the vast airports placed many miles from the cities they serve, in some cases built on artificial islands or set, like Kuala Lumpur, in tropical jungle. Such places, with their own aerial supply routes and security systems, could simultaneously withstand a siege and topple a government. This is why, in a war, the airport is always one of the first places to be seized. This is why we have seen the armed forces deployed to protect Heathrow. 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 Wright brothers flew for the first time in 1903, then set up their first airfield a century ago, in 1904. This was the 84-acre Huffman Prairie, near their home town of Dayton, Ohio. It eventually led to a phenomenon of today such as Denver International Airport, Colorado, with its signature white-peaked, tented terminal roof, designed by the architects Fentress Bradburn. The terminal is huge, but the entire airport, a key North American hub, is huger. It is by no means the world’s busiest (Heathrow and Atlanta dispute that accolade), but is the largest. The airport had cost £1.8 billion by the time its first phase was opened in 1995, and it is designed to more than double in size. It has six runways, none of which intersect, and will eventually have 13. It covers 53 square miles — twice the area of Manhattan and 400 times the size of Huffman Prairie.
The question is, what happens now? Spielberg’s Navorski char-acter is very loosely based on the real-life case of Merhan Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian asylum-seeker who has been living in Paris Charles de Gaulle airport since 1988. He is free to leave now, but chooses not to. It is his home. In The Terminal, Spielberg and his writers develop this into the notion of an airport as that old movie stand-by, a microcosm of society. The coming and going of planes scarcely matters: it exists as an organism in its own right. This is surely correct. Good architecture should be flexible enough to do anything. Its greatest 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.
Hugh Pearman’s Airports: A Century of Architecture is published by Laurence King in October
