Grounding the airport.

The airport, the twentieth-century's unique building. type, seems to be growing up - to be starting to have the ability to celebrate rites of passage as well as brute function. But while airports are likely to be some of our most permanent buildings, we are far from being able to evolve ways of relating them to the fabric of cities.

We tend to have a rather exaggerated notion of twentieth-century mobility. Patrick Geddes once remarked that the Roman Empire had a communication system so efficient that it was not bettered in terms of speed until the nineteenth century,(1) and not equalled in density of network until this one. Even in medieval times, he pointed out, after the destruction of the Roman road system, huge numbers of people went round Europe on pilgrimages, and (often monstrously) on the Crusades.(2) In the Muslim world, many moved over vast distances to undertake the hadj, and the great trans-Asian caravans linked China and Europe by very well ordered routes. The explorations of the world by Europeans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries(3) paved the way for quite large proportions of then much smaller populations to travel long distances. So the notion that before the advent of mechanical transport, people travelled little or not at all is another example of twentieth-century hubris. Travel has always been part of human culture since our species emerged as hunter-gatherers.

But of course the frequency and convenience of long-distance travel have greatly improved, and for the individual traveller it has never been cheaper. Yet in terms of investment, in vessels, tracks and systems and in arrival and departure buildings, transport has never cost more. As David Harvey has pointed out, this has led to some interesting contradictions in modern capitalism which, he holds, is concerned to 'reduce spatial barriers, to annihilate space through time' with mass transport, free flows of capital, resources and information.(4) But 'spatial barriers can be reduced only through the production of particular spaces (railways, highways, airports, teleports and so on) ... The production, restructuring and growth of spatial organisation is a highly problematic and very expensive affair, held back by vast investments in physical infrastructures that cannot be moved, and social infrastructures that are always slow to change'.(5) So in a curious way, the very investments made in the transport structure to make it more efficient and universalizing tend to provide stabilizing points and elements in the constant flux of the post-modern world.

While airports, stations and other such buildings cannot, as some have argued, be a substitute for the traditional city (see p50), because of their stabilizing effect and their huge human and economic importance, they need special treatment. This is only gradually being realized: think for instance of the shambolic accretive chaos of Heathrow Terminals 1 and 2 (and hundreds of others round the world). Or the dreary processing shed at Heathrow Terminal 4 and all its many cousins. Piano and Foster have shown how the experience of airports can be agreeable, dignified and efficient, with well-lit spaces, clearly planned routes to lead passengers between land and air transport, and, most important of all, sense of individual place within the mighty whole. Distracting excrescences and events are minimized, while views out to the aeroplanes (and over sea and mountains in the case of Osaka and Hong Kong) are offered in ways which open the buildings to their surroundings, and allow their users to orientate themselves in relation to earth and sky.

The parade of human life

While they may not be city squares, airports do have analogies with traditional city forms: the most obvious being the gate in the city wall, and by extension, the station. From the earliest times, transition from travel to stasis has been celebrated in buildings which are both security barriers and monuments to arrival and departure, With the new generation, it can be argued that airports have begun to show that they are capable of embodying such rites of passage in agreeable, efficient and dignified ways. They have perhaps achieved the degree of integration with the web of ordinary life which Frith and Monet celebrated in the nineteenth century. Yet a mere couple of decades earlier than those artists made their great paintings which show the station as a setting for the parade of human life, Dickens could portray the railways' arrival in London in Dombey and Son as the 'track of the remorceless monster, Death'. A train 'shrieks and cries(6) as it comes tearing on resistless to the goal: and now its way, still like the way of Death, is strewn with ashes thickly. Everything around is blackened. There are dark pools of water, muddy lanes and miserable habitations far below'.(7)

Half a century ago, Heathrow (now the busiest international airport in the world) was a cluster of second-hand military tents in a muddy field.(8) Air travelling then was as crude and horrid as rail journeys in Mr Dombey's day. While no one could possibly claim that travel through any of Heathrow's terminals is agreeable, it is now neither frightening nor disgusting. Presumably the technology of air transport will continue to improve (if not perhaps at the same pace), and we can look forward to at least the difference in experience between Dickens and Frith.

Railway stations are so much taken for granted now that they are seen as essential parts of the structure of cities. Habitude and changes in technology (mainly the abandonment of steam, and the general acceptance of the less obviously polluting internal combustion engine) have made such a difference in our perception of stations that few find them disagreeable any more (at least on the continent of Europe, Japan and other places in which rail travel is properly regarded as being a civilized form of locomotion): indeed no self-respecting German speaking town is without its Bahnhofstrasse, or a French one without its rue de la Gate. And we now have a climate in which stations are beginning to extend their roles. In the more civilized parts of Europe, stations have never been ashamed of giving a decent meal.(9) Now, they are taking on and renewing other roles, as for instance in the extension to the Zurich Hauptbahnhof shows (p79) with its new arcades and automated supermarkets, which can be used at night when (quite reasonably) no Swiss shop assistant will work.

Harvey is surely correct in his analysis that the investment in a transport terminal is so colossal that we must expect stations, airports and so on to be almost the only stable elements in a constantly shifting modern urbscape in which only quite a small proportion of the general fabric will remain (saved for aesthetic, historical or peculiar economic reasons). Termini may grow and change, but they cannot be relocated. So they had better be tamed. Osaka and Chek Lap Kok (p50) show how they can be made into memorable and humanly enriching places.

New synthesis needed

What is still unclear is how they can be related to the rest of the city. Without radical new technologies, we cannot expect to see the close integration of city and airport that was attempted in '30s experiments like Tempelhof and Croydon.(10) We should be looking forward to a new symbiosis in which city and transport termini can grow together, as they did with such pain in the nineteenth century.

Architecture seems to be gradually getting airports right. Planning, architecture's now often neglected sibling, seems not to have caught up. In Hong Kong, the smallness of the territory (and the nature of its previous government) ensured that Chek Lap Kok had to be intimately related to the centre of the city. And that it would generate a city quarter on Lantau. Contingencies have made the new Hong Kong airport a crucible of thought about how to make gateways and memorable places. We need many more such experiments.

1 Though now every time a 747 takes off, it uses the same power as all the horses of the Roman Empire.

2 Geddes, Patrick, Cities in Evolution, Williams and Norgate, London, 1949, p60.

3 And, it must be said, the infamous Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades.

4 Harvey, David, The Condition of Postmodernity, Blackwell, Cambridge, Mass and Oxford, 1992, p232.

5 Idem.

6 You can still hear this shrieking and crying on London's Docklands Light Railway, which seems to have been designed to Victorian track specifications.

7 Dickens, Charles, Dombey and Son, chapter XX (the novel was published in parts during 1846 and 1847).

8 Best, Alastair, AR May 1991, pp58-61.

9 Nor in the best of America. The oyster bar at Grand Central in New York urbanely continues to offer memorable gastronomic pleasures.

10 More recent experiments like the City Airport in London (which provides international flights to neighbouring capitals From the old inner London Docklands) scarcely count, for their traffic is only a trickle.