Gate Change

Airports used to be called "fields"—as in La Guardia Field and O'Hare Field. All you needed was a grassy landing strip and a windsock, and perhaps a shack for the passengers, who simply walked over to the planes. By the late 1920s, as air travel became more widespread, larger buildings were required, with ticketing counters, waiting rooms, baggage handling, customs and immigration, and so on. The design of new building types has often borrowed from the past—early skyscrapers looked liked steeples, for example—but the 19^th-century railroad terminal, a monumental concourse in the front and a steel-and-glass shed over the platforms in the back, was not easily adapted to air travel. Architects have struggled with the problem of how to design airports ever since—and have produced a variety of different solutions.
Photograph courtesy Brian Lea.
Although William Adams Delano and Chester Holmes Aldrich are best known for their exceptional country houses in revival styles, the two architects were also pioneers of aviation architecture. In 1928, they were commissioned to build a terminal in Miami for Pan American Airways and a few years later a seaplane base in Coconut Grove, Fla., where passengers could board Clipper flying boats. They followed these up with the New York Municipal Airport (later called LaGuardia Field), which served both land planes and seaplanes. (The marine air terminal is at right.) The free-standing terminals resembled simple geometrical volumes (an airy vaulted hangarlike shed in Miami, a drum enclosing a circular concourse in New York). The buildings included observation decks and vertically separated arrival and departure areas and were decorated with stylized globes, signs of the zodiac, and, in the case of the marine terminal, dolphins. Delano and Aldrich adopted a clean, streamlined Art Deco style that suggested efficiency and modernity, and crowned the New York land terminal with a large steel eagle, symbolizing flight.
Survey of LaGuardia Airport's Marine Air Terminal, 1974, via Wikipedia. This image is in the public domain.
In 1941, Delano and Aldrich were commissioned to plan a brand-new airport for New York City at Idlewild, and they proposed a massive circular terminal building with 700-foot spokes housing the gates. This was never built, but two decades later Idlewild (today John F. Kennedy International Airport) was the site of another ambitious experiment. Hired by TWA to design a new terminal, Eero Saarinen, with characteristic flair, determined that the entire building should say "flight." His solution: not a sculpted eagle but a building shaped like a bird. Saarinen's interiors were self-consciously futurist and resembled a set for a science-fiction movie. The building, executed with conviction and enormous skill (this was before computer-aided design), made a powerful impact when it opened in 1962, although its long-term influence on airport design proved to be negligible. Nothing ages faster than today's idea of tomorrow.
Photograph by Todd Lappin/Telstar Logistics.
For Washington, D.C.'s Dulles International Airport, Saarinen went in a different direction, rethinking not only how an airport should look but also how it functioned. In order to get rid of the long and featureless corridors and walkways that led from the terminal to the gates, Saarinen invented a "mobile lounge" that could transport passengers directly from the terminal to the planes, which were parked some distance away on the tarmac. The terminal was now a single hall, cars arriving on one side, mobile lounges departing on the other. Nothing could be simpler. The problem was that neither the passengers nor the airlines warmed to the concept; the lounges were more like wide buses than rooms, and with the advent of jumbo jets, they proved inefficient. Although a few airports adopted mobile lounges, most stuck with the terminal-and-gates solution.
Main Terminal of Washington Dulles International Airport, via Wikipedia. This image is in the public domain.
In 1988, the United Airlines terminal at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport opened. The idea here was to make the walk to the gate as architecturally interesting as the terminal itself. Instead of trying to discover a new architectural style for the airport, as Saarinen had done, architect Helmut Jahn simply updated the imagery of the Victorian train shed. The exposed steel structural elements are fussy and stylized, however, producing a cartoonish version of the original. The effect is tantamount to outfitting modern pilots with leather helmets and flying goggles. Not that it matters; here, as in many airports, the architecture ends up obliterated by a welter of graphics, signs, and advertisements.
Photograph by Robert Werner, 2005, via Wikipedia. This image is licensed under GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2.
There are now 85 airports in the United States that handle more than 1 million passenger boardings. The largest, in area, is Denver International, whose opening in 1995 was marked by an infamous engineering failure—the $230 million baggage-handling system ran amok, losing and mangling bags. The building was designed by Fentress Bradburn Architects and consisted of a tensile fabric structure. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill had done much the same thing 20 years earlier in the Hajj Terminal in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. A tent roof probably makes more sense in sweltering Saudi Arabia than in snowy Colorado, but the airport owners liked the distinctive silhouette, which is often compared to the nearby Rockies.
Photograph by Doc Searls, via Wikipedia. This image is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 1.0.
Despite its tensile structure, there is something almost whimsical about the design of the Denver airport. Whimsy is entirely absent from Stansted Terminal, outside London, which opened a few years earlier.* The terminal merged engineering, function, and aesthetics in what was essentially a large shed. Shed sounds utilitarian, but this space has the impact of a Gothic cathedral nave. Light enters from above, and the entire roof is supported by repetitive treelike structural modules. Stansted is a breakthrough, for Norman Foster had discovered a compelling solution to the problem of designing an airport: no metaphors of flight, no symbolic technology, no reviving the past (although Stansted does recall a very large aircraft hanger), and, instead, a building that demonstrates a structural and functional logic that is no less rigorous than the aeronautical design of a plane. The resulting paradigm shift has led to a whole generation of "elegant shed" airports: Hong Kong and Beijing (Foster), Madrid Barajas and Heathrow Terminal 5 (Richard Rogers), and Kansai (Renzo Piano).
*This article originally misspelled the airport's name.
Photograph by Nicolas Rudelle.
Kansai Airport sits on a man-made island in Japan's Osaka Bay. The basic plan is simple: A terminal building handles ticketing and baggage, and a milelong gallery accommodates the gates. Renzo Piano turns the tunnellike space into an evocative combination of light-filled greenhouse and dirigible shed. To get to the gates, passengers board a people mover, an automated tram that runs along the exterior of the building. There is some of the fluidity of Saarinen's TWA here—Piano's roof is invariably compared to an airfoil—but the lightweight structure is highly rationalized in the manner of Stansted. (Ove Arup & Partners were the structural engineers on both projects.) The airfoil roof is not only resistant to typhoon winds; it allows conditioned air to be blown across its inside surface, reducing the need for ducts.
Photograph by Alexs Letterbox, 2005, via Wikipedia. This image is licensed under GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2.
What should an airport look like? The Victorian railroad terminal celebrated the excitement associated with fast long-distance travel. Trains had dining cars and sleepers, and a corresponding sense of elegance permeated the station, even if you were traveling second-class. Excitement and elegance have long since worn off air travel. People just want to get where they're going as quickly and painlessly as possible. The best you hope for is that you get through the security line quickly, your flight's on time, there's space for your bag in the overhead bin, and if you're really lucky, the adjacent seat is empty. Airports have become as ubiquitous—and about as glamorous—as bus stations. Perhaps that's really the new model. In the talented hands of a Piano or a Foster, the bus station will be light and airy, but the kind of theatricality shown by the first generation of airports now seems out of place.
Photograph of Baltimore/Washington International Airport by Rudi Riet, 2007, via Wikipedia. This image is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 1.0.