Nobody likes airports if they are delayed there. Which means nobody likes London's Heathrow, and particularly not on those occasions, as recently, 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 once it has landed on the return journey. No wonder they are now building Richard Rogers' enormous, bureaucratically-delayed new Terminal 5 just as fast as they can. But the world will have to wait until 2008 for that to open. And yet, airport terminals can be the most exciting places on earth. When efficiency of operation is combined with the best architecture 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 got to the science-fiction dream of the city of tomorrow.
