For once a new book rather than an article: an illustrated history and analysis of the airport as architecture. I can't give you the whole book here so I'll present a flavour of it, plus some of my favourite images.
"Airports: a century of architecture" is now out, published by Abrams in the United States, Laurence King in the U.K, and in Spanish by H. Kliczkowski of Madrid. Current prices on Amazon: $47.24 in the States, £28 in Britain, Euros 60.
The airport terminal is a building type that has had a century to develop. It combines elements of several other building types of today, but its roots are more complex still, to be found in earlier building types such as factories, botanical glasshouses, railway stations and shipyards, hotels and clubs, post and telegraph offices, department stores, even hospitals, military barracks and fortresses. Aspects of all these antecedents feed into the design of the airport terminal building. But the airport as a whole is not really a building at all. It is too dispersed, it contains too many systems, it has to do too many things, it covers too great a physical area and affects a much wider one. It is indeed a town or city, requiring broad urbanistic skills as well as architectural, structural and mechanical expertise.
This book looks at how the airport has developed as a concept and a reality, ever since humans first floated off the ground in the 18th century.
Chapter One looks at some of the precursors, from the astonishing airship hangar devised by the French military engineer Jean-Baptiste-Marie Meunier in 1784 - surely the world's first lighter-than air structure, though never built - to the equally extraordinary 1893 giant steam-powered plane of the American-born, British based engineer Sir Hiram Maxim (inventor of the Maxim machine gun) with its hangar and launch track. Did the plane fly? Well, it certainly lurched inelegantly off the ground. Then came the Wright Brothers and the first real airfield, while the First World War provided huge technological impetus.
Chapter Two recounts the birth and growth of civil aviation in the inter-war years, and how the airport terminal evolved as a new building type, especially in Europe (by this point America, oddly enough, was lagging about ten years behind). What type of aircraft would become dominant - airship, flying boat or land plane? Nobody knew, so many airports were designed to handle all three. By the late 1930s many of the great evocative airports were built, from Pan Am's flying boat terminals and New York's La Guardia to the European Big Three of Berlin Tempelhof, Paris Le Bourget, and London Croydon - though Liverpool's Speke was architecturally superior to the capital's.
Chapter Three, "The Romantic Illusion" takes a more sidelong look at things through the romantically misguided notions of several generations of visionary architects, including Futurist Antonio Sant'Elia, Le Corbusier, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Their ideas fed the fevered imaginations of magazine editors, who imagined cities abuzz with personal planes landing on the tops of buildings.
Chapter Four is subtitled "The Imagery of Flight", and discusses the key metaphor of airport buildings from the 1930s to the present day. Buildings that look like planes, or birds, or even spacecraft. How odd that the high-tech architects of the late 20th century should have been so fond of the airliner designs of the 1920s and 1930s - the juxtaposition of Norman Foster's Stansted with an Imperial Airways Handley-Page "Heracles" of the Twenties is telling.
In Chapter Five, the arrival of the jet age stimulates rapid expansion and a reconsideration of what an airport should be. This was the era of the great sculptural gestures of Saarinen at the TWA terminal at JFK and Dulles, Washington. But don't forget the wonderful flying saucer of the rival Pan Am terminal at JFK.
Chapter Six reflects on the appeal of the smaller airport - which gives architects a chance to rethink such places on a sometimes domestic and often innovative way. None more so that at Bundaberg Airport in the Australian outback, conceived as an organic form, or Frank Gehry's proposals for the Watergate at Venice Marco Polo.
With Chapter Seven, we move on to the latest mega-airports of the world, those that can most truly claim to be cities in themselves: Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Singapore. And perhaps most intriguing of those to come: Foster's great Beijing Airport, slated for the Olympics in 2008, the world's largest construction project. And in the Endnote, we consider the future. Or rather, six different possible futures for this simultaneously exciting and exasperating phenomenon of our times.
The success of an airport is conventionally measured by its efficiency, by its ability to manage the arrival and departure of planes on time for the minimum of passenger effort. While much of this is to do with technically complex interlocking systems stretching internationally, the successful airport is about more than military precision. People spend a lot of time in these buildings. We queue, we eat, we shop, we make emotional or calm departures and arrivals, we spend our entire working day there, or we merely pass through on their way to somewhere else.
The building where all this happens therefore has to encompass an overall experience made up of several different and sometimes conflicting strands. Architecture is called upon to do many things here, but one of its principal tasks - even if this never appears in any briefing document - is to calm the nerves and lift the spirits. We have to feel confidence in our airport buildings, and more than that. Just as a great railway station never palls, so a great airport terminal should provoke a sense of delight and pleasurable anticipation. It is not easy. But it is achievable.
Also by Hugh Pearman: the bestselling "Contemporary World Architecture", published by Phaidon.
