Uncloaking the Romance of Flying: the enervated air age

By Jane Holtz Kay

Once upon a time, glamour rode the airways. So what if land-loving passengers clutched their arm rests and agoraphobic flyers refused to fly at all? The Wright brothers' invention changed the world. Carrying aviators and passengers aloft in what approximated ecstasy, early airplanes soon demanded a new and evolving style of airport architecture.

Alistair Gordon's, well-written, if limited Naked Airport - "A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure" (Metropolitan Books, 2004) launches his tale of this nation-defining building type through Charles Lindbergh's eyes. The pilot tucks fear in his leather cap, soars off into the skies, and, finally finds a landing pad. "Yes, It's definitely an airport..." he observed prosaically in 1927, a portend, one might say, of the 21st century's non-love affair with the reality of aviation. Today, as suitcases are ransacked, planes delayed, airport design panders to the lowest common denominator of the walkable, the edible and the readable.

Still, this is now. That was then, when the dashing hero ended his famous 30 hour, 3,610-mile flight by descending in front of an ecstatic crowd, igniting the world into skybound delirium. Gordon's history is both architecturally sound and workmanlike, as he describes the evolution of air travel from mail service to massive consumer of both the spacious skies and the zone of silence that once characterized the cities and suburbs of America.

Along his more or less merry way, Gordon details the architects' and planners' plotting of new types and places to park the new vehicle and their styles of architecture. These range from the early artful compact terminals to the recent era of jutting, expanding, commanding shapes that to this generation seem to gracelessly swallow the landscape.

Who can deny the early thrill of seeing the world from on height? The shrinking of space that made the planet a global village? Who can deny, as well, the mono-culture of McDonald's, the outsourcing of jobs, and the pollution and land alterations produced by the hardtopping of runways and roads to the terminal itself? For all the ill effect on the landscape, the architectural display that followed-- from the Beaux-Arts airports of Europe to the modernist splendor of Eero Saarinen's TWA terminal‹began the air age with a clash of symbols.

The airplane, Americans exulted, would advance the "horizontal age." And so it did. Like the automobile, the plane's need for access shaped space, defining "a new kind of peripheral zone" for the urban fabric, writes Gordon. Propped early on by the federal government --$27 million from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) for the 1939 New York City Municipal Airport (now La Guardia Airport)-- so it stayed, with no tax on airplane fuel to this day, giving the skybound the same subsidies as the carbound,

But, alas, Naked Airport seems as barren of questions on the ills of air life as the Emperor is of new clothes. Little heed is paid to the end result of subsidized air travel cluttering our environs, polluting our skies and shattering our ear drums on terra firma. Meanwhile, airport sprawl is added to the land planner's vocabulary, thanks in no small part to the "upgrading" and expanding of airports nationwide, not to mention abroad: in China, where some 30 medium-sized airports are now under construction, or Ireland, where Dublin's new expansion moves ahead despite local protests.

For all the thrills and glories of airports past and future, September 11 and the more recent toppling of a new terminal at DeGaulle symbolize the shaky-kneed status of today's flying. The epoch of "getting there is half the fun," has vanished as we remove our boots for inspection, wait for late planes, scurry to make delayed connections and sit stuck in traffic on highways that take us home to sleep beneath flyover jets spraying pollutants across the skies.

The fact that the airplanes' contrails produce more pollution and greenhouse gas emissions than any other single artifact (including cars)--while airport siting undermines rail transportation, and increases sprawl--rarely enters either the government's planners' handbooks. Nary a word goes to the thin foundations of airport architecture, which rest on subsidized bailouts as Congressmen get PAC money from industry handouts and passengers get ever more shoddy treatment.

It is a shame that the author of this competent history, like many an architect, perhaps, looks to the sticks and stones of design and not the overall structure of mobility, compatibility and comfort. Like the designer who creates a pretty picture window while his client rues the day when the windows don't open, America's air empire is as "naked" in form and function as Gordon's title proclaims.

The above "Protest" article appeared in the November 2003 issue of Architecture under the headline "Airports Are Getting Bigger, but so is their Polluting Potential and Sprawl-Expanding Effects on Our Cities and Suburbs."

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