The architecture of airports

I’ve been fascinated with various forms of large-scale transportation since I was very young. I grew up in a non-descript western Nebraska community that boasts the worlds largest rail classification yards. And after my first time flying — first time old enough to remember, anyway — I became infatuated with commercial aviation. Any time an airplane, small props such as the Beechcraft 1900 in the case of the North Platte airport, flew within hearing I would look up. Thankfully this wasn’t very often in the small town, or I might have acquired a permanent crick in my neck. More reflection on my interest in aviation is in this post from June of last year.

I don’t fly all that much, but in the last five weeks I set foot in airports for two separate trips. My layover was in Memphis in both cases. The Memphis airport is a dreary place to be (the one point of promise was the real-live art hanging on the walls). In the concourses ceilings are low, corridors are narrow and the tiled walls are a drab brown-gray. It may be the ugliest airport I’ve been in.

But a lot of airports look like this, bland and uninviting. Situation Terminal, from The New Yorker’s website, tackles the question “Can anyone design a nice aiport?” The story lays out a bit of airport design history, suggesting the logistical nightmare that is a large airport and tight finances fostered a more or less pragmatic approach to terminal and concourse design in the last thirty to forty years. Attempts at reinventing the airport were, while perhaps visually interesting, failures in function. The New Yorker cites Eero Saarinen’s efforts at JFK and Dulles in this regard.

“Since then,” the story says, “airport authorities have been wary of letting any architect have a say on what should go where. Now most architects don’t get to do much more than give the main concourse a big, swooping space with natural light — like the one in the new American Airlines terminal at Kennedy airport — which acts as little more than a distraction from the banality of the rest of the terminal.”

There are, however, two shining examples of a better way to design airports according to columnist Paul Goldberger. Norman Foster’s Beijing Capital International Airport’s Terminal 3 is the airport rethought, successfully according to Goldberger. Apparently the space is intuitive and logistically more sound than the comfortable — even if archaic — model airports presently defer to.

I’m not so keen on the aesthetics from what I can tell in the architects renderings, though, or the 500+ photos uploaded to Flickr. It looks like a very large commercial building, like so many other airports, from what I can tell. Sure, it appears as though the architect specified some attempts to cover up the generally cold underlying structure, but based on the images I’m finding online the attempt was futile. The one exception is the Ground Transportation Centre. This space actually looks pleasant to be in.

The second example of a new airport architecture Goldberger’s piece cites is Terminal 4 in Madrid. The column doesn’t say much about function in Richard Roger’s Barajas Airport project, but the images lend me to believe this is, overall, a much more inviting environment than Terminal 3 in Beijing.

My own experience lies more with smaller venues, such as the Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport (XNA) or Lincoln [Nebraska] Airport (LNK). In many ways these smaller airports are much nicer to fly in and out of, even if there aren’t as many restaurants to choose from. I often wonder if the hub and spoke system major airlines use to get people from place to place is less than optimal. I suppose — that is, I hope — the airlines have seriously considered alternatives to this model at some point in their history. With all of the financial trouble most of them are in right now, one would think this might be a good time to revisit a variety of innovative options in order to say afloat and gain and edge on the competition.