Moving places.

The ubiquity of modern transport is one of the greatest blessings of the modern world - and one of its greatest problems, not only by destroying the upper atmosphere but by helping generate a completely homogenized planet. Architecture can at least help counteract the latter.

It was curious of the Norwegian government to require that the nation's new international airport at Gardermoen should offer some of the flavour of the country (p44).(1) At first, the notion seems naive and rather like the demands made by some developing nations a decade or two ago that indigenous cultures should be clearly expressed in their brand new buildings. These were largely built by international consultants whose comprehension of local culture was in inverse ratio to their ability to make large quantities of money and get out fast. Results of that thinking can be seen all over the world in fibreglass ogee arches, fake columns, false domes and absurd pilasters glued over standard international sheds devoted to the most utilitarian kinds of people-movement. Today, most of those acres of applied decoration are fading, and partly obliterated by extensions and advertising. (A good lesson this for all the early '90s PoMo designers: if your architecture lives by the sign, it will probably die by it as well.)

In Norway, the same kind of thinking would have resulted in a building made of logs (probably plastic), artificially weathered brickwork and perhaps a turf roof or two. Of course this did not happen, partly because lessons have been learned from the disasters of crude historicism, and partly perhaps because Norway has a long tradition of discovering its identity in the modern world, and went through its wildly eclectic nationalist phase more than a century ago. A much cooler, more abstract approach to expressing identity was attempted, and in many ways, it has worked. And it has worked because the lessons of Modernism have been understood. By using those quintessentially twentieth-century materials, reinforced concrete, large paned glass and laminated timber, the architects have made travellers aware of their routes to and from the planes, and the drama of air travel is made clear (something that Foster wanted to achieve at Stansted, but was prevented by bureaucratic stolidity - AR May 1991). Above all, the airport is experientially anchored into the rolling landscape, which gives this totally twentieth-century, and usually anonymous building type a sense of location based on immemorial cultivation of field and forest.

Yet for all the abstraction they attempted, some of the architects in the group which created the building were worried about the requirement that wood should be used as a sort of advertisement for Norway's nature and its products: this, they thought, was the first step in a slippery slope that would lead to a mess of plastic trolls and gemutlich Norsk boutiques served by women with long blond plaits decked out in post-industrial peasant costumes. Doubtless, there will be such people in the shops. No matter how carefully controlled the signage (if the authorities can do this, they will have done better than anywhere else in the world), there can scarcely be restrictions on what people can wear. But, so far, Gardermoen remains remarkably unkitschy. It achieves identity and particularity without flaunting and appealing to the lowest common denominator. A distinct, calm place, it lets you know exactly where you are - a very rare phenomenon within the amorphous homogenized world of air travel.

Nothing can, you might think, be more unlike air travel than going by metro. Yet architectural and experiential problems are similar in some ways: large numbers of people have to be organized as reassuringly and expeditiously as possible; they have to be assisted from walking unassisted to frighteningly powerful transport machines. And, as in all other forms of mass transport, the actual experience of travelling can be very disorientating: we are marshalled forward into a world in which we are virtually powerless as individuals, a world in which there is little differentiation - for even when airborne, we are often in the darkness of night, or in endless space hovering between a platform of grey cloud and the blue vault. In human terms, the seamless, meaningless subterranean world is not so very different from the void in the sky (except of course, that we often have to travel squashed and standing up in the tube). Metro travellers are as much in need of a sense of place as airline passengers.

Roland Paoletti, chief architect of the new extension to London's metro(2) network, has been quite clear about this, and clear too that thought is the answer to placelessness (p54). He had the nerve to ask nine of Britain's best architects to design stations on the new line (reserving only two for his own team to create).(3) Only a very few general rules were set - for instance that the structural bones of the great engineering project(4) should be allowed to form the spaces, which should as far as possible be illuminated by daylight, even at the lowest levels (p68), so keeping travellers in some sort of contact with time, weather and seasons. Preliminary results of Paoletti's policy are impressive. Each of the stations has particular character. Regular travellers will know where they are not just by signs but by the nature of the spaces of the stations; novices will have their journey made memorable by the succession of particular places. Even in the fabled days of the London underground system, under Frank Pick and Charles Holden,(5) there was little attempt to differentiate between stations underground (though at street level, each of the politely urbane Dudokian stations has individual presence). Paoletti's ambition, and the built achievements, are quite remarkable: even deep stations have been given presence, and not by applying decoration.(6)

Gardermoen and the new Jubilee Line stations are powerful arguments for architecture: they make travel as convenient and direct as modern technology will allow, and they enhance experiences of arrival and departure. They are above all, memorable places. In a world which is being increasingly flattened and homogenized by the often terrifying forces of capitalist globalization (which smear when they do not crush) it is essential that fixed, recognizable points can be established: ones which individuals can choose to make landmarks on their internal maps. Creation of such anchor points in the imagination is a task of architecture which distinguishes it from engineering. Perhaps it is the chief one. It is ironical but very encouraging that such good examples as those in this issue have emerged from a sector of activity as grimly reductive as modern transport, dominated as it is by civil and mechanical engineering, and which is itself a major force for erosion of the once wondrous variety of the world. With such buildings, architecture introduces a powerful humane antithesis to the usually dreary normative world of transport. We need more of them.

1 In fact, the Norwegian government has a policy of trying to ensure that public buildings should set a high standard of design (AR August 1993). Gardermoen could be seen to be a specific extension of the approach.

2 There is a myth (denied by some) that the international word 'metro' is a French shortening of 'Metropolitan Railway', the first urban underground railway in the world built in London in the 1860s.

3 The line is the more remarkable because planning for it started under the Conservative government, which was opposed to public transport in general and rail in particular. The crass development of London's Docklands (in which some of the most gross buildings in Europe were thrown up by hugely subsidized private capitalists) was served only by the ramshackle, groaning Docklands Light Railway, so a proper mass transit system was much needed.

4 It is one of the most difficult lines ever built because of the complexity of the land through which it goes, permeated by centuries-old pollution, service routes, sewers and underground rivers - and of course, other railways.

5 Frank Pick was Director of the London Passenger Transport Board and Charles Holden was the chief architectural consultant.

6 A policy adopted in other parts of London Underground and elsewhere, not entirely unsuccessfully: think for instance of the Louvre station in Paris, or Eduardo Paolozzi's decorations at Tottenham Court Road in London.