"Architecture: Coming to an airport near you"

Sunday, August 17, 2003

Architecture: City life: coming to an airport near you
By Nigel Coates
United Kingdom - The Independent on Sunday 


Air travel now is hell. It's the unavoidable purgatory you go through to
reach your destination. But flying used to be a special experience. People
found it as potent as the arrival itself. It was expensive and glamorous.
The bigger the airport and the more international and diverse the people
using it, the more overtly architectural the building. 

My preference now is for smaller airports. I prefer Pisa to Fiumicino,
Cordoba to Buenes Aires, Palm Springs to JFK. They're quick and direct. No
long queues and special offers. The planes are so big compared with the
buildings. The radar tower still has a meaning. 

A friend's mother remembers that, when she started flying for BOAC, Heathrow
had only recently given up being a series of tents. The first time I flew
was in 1961 as a 12 year-old. Everyone went through what is now Terminal 2,
which had a double height space with Fifties chandeliers inspired by DNA
spirals. It was big and glamorous, both in its scale and its curious
Anglo-modern brick architecture. 

Now Heathrow has grown to such an extent that all the gaps are filled in and
tunnels connect everything to everything else. From the outside it's a cross
between Birmingham Bull Ring and Blue Water. Any architecture has long been
submerged in a sea of lounges full of shops. 

In contrast, the extraordinary TWA terminal at JFK, Eero Saarinen's
archetypal but utterly untypical building, links the ground to the air, and
makes an effective link between the identity of New York and all its
destinations. This building continues to celebrate the glamour of flying,
despite all the current pressure to sell and service the passengers up to
the hilt. Santiago Calatrava's recent Bilbao airport does the same. 

The proposed Terminal 5 at Heathrow, on the other hand, is destined to be
one of those factory airports dedicated to travelling ants. A designer I met
recently is working on the interior, and therefore the provision of retail
and food outlets for the building. According to him, the scheme by Richard
Rogers completely ignores the role of retail by pretending it isn't going to
be there. This would suit BA, who would prefer to sell duty free in the air,
but it's odd for BAA for whom retail is the meaning of life. 

When Norman Foster's Stansted airport opened in 1990, it was everything that
a modern airport should be - cathedral-like space, open views and direct
lines, and a smooth process of check-in to plane. Efficiency was to be the
name of the game. But now it's a favela full of ghastly shops and spatial
manipulation so cheap as to be a perfect match for the bloated, tattooed
retornados from the Canaries in shorts and straw hats. Sockshop, Sunglasses
Hut, Costa Coffee and Books Etc never inspired me on the high street and I
can see no reason why they would here. 

For large airports, the inevitable next step is to become cities themselves.
To do so they would need all those extra possibilities that are above and
beyond shopping. In one old project of mine I suggested that Heathrow should
have its own opera house, implying that people would go there for
entertainment instead of travel. I've since heard that some people, with all
their possessions in their luggage, actually live at Heathrow. 

This airport/city theme was taken up by Mark Eacott, one of my MA students
at the Royal College of Art, with his final year project. The idea was to
transform some of its spaces into a secret leisure network. You'd pretend to
your friends that you whereof to the Maldives, but in reality you'd be
slipping into a new kind of terrestrial Club World. 

For the following few days you'd be pitching your luck in a parallel place
of well-being clinics, saunas and singles' bars. One of these bars in
particular would have a gently domed glass roof merging with the ground
alongside the runway. You'd be drinking your dry martini, as, yards away,
those giant tyres would skid on touch down. Every other minute, you'd feel
the same shiver of excitement.


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