Places of transition.

Travel is an inescapable component of contemporary life, so it is important that ports and stations become civilised places in their own right. New approaches emerge.

Large-scale travel is a phenomenon of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - it is easy to forget how profound, irreversible and revolutionary the changes caused by mass transport have been. Before the invention of the railway, travel was largely restricted to the rich - or the energetic and determined who could walk for long distances. In the middle of the nineteenth century, it was quite common to find people even in a comparatively small island like Britain who had never seen the sea. Fifty years later such sedentariness was most unusual, and by 1914 the Powers were waging war on a massive scale, possible only because of the means of mass transport. (Indeed, as historians have often pointed out, the Great War was in a sense made inevitable by the railways themselves, for once Russia and Austria had started to mobilise, there was no way of reversing the trains carrying troops to the front.)

Notwithstanding ever more sophisticated developments in electronic communications, mass transport systems seem bound to continue to grow in popularity. For all its reliance on fossil fuels and destructive effects on the atmosphere, air travel will grow almost exponentially for the foresee-able future. Soon the citizen of a developed country who has never been in an aeroplane will be as rare as the person who had never been in a train at the turn of the century. Rail itself is making a strong riposte on practical and ecological grounds - even in Britain, where the railways have been under attack for 15 years from short-sighted and simplistic governments. The opening of the Channel Tunnel has finally re-alerted the British to the benefits of rail travel (once the system is working properly, there will surely be few who will wish to travel from London to Paris or Brussels by plane rather than train). The connection to the Continent makes all too clear the difference between the British system and those of, for instance, France and Germany where huge amounts of public investment have gone into improving and extending the rail system.

But Britain has got at least one thing right. Nicholas Grimshaw's Waterloo terminal for the Channel trains (AR September 1993) is a triumph, and is largely so because it reinterprets for our time a very well-loved building type, the great glass and metal train shed, using contemporary technology and circulation management. The train shed (which emerged in England in the 1840s) is one of the most successful inventions of a new building type in the last 200 years. It orders and directs passengers to the trains, protects them from the weather and facilitates the transition from pedestrian movement to rail travel. It seems so natural now that it is difficult to remember how dramatic and revolutionary it was when it was first evolved: never before had so many people been moved with such frequency and efficiency; never before had the new technologies been used on such a scale to create an intermediate world between inside and out. It was remarkably disturbing and exciting, not least to the critics. Ruskin for instance hated the tectonics, the style - and perhaps the notion of lots of people travelling around rapidly.(1) Even Gottfried Semper, often regarded as the great apostle of material-based aesthetics, was only prepared to welcome the 'simple, exposed iron roof-truss designed by engineers for railway stations ... which bear witness to their provisional nature'.(2) Semper feared 'the dangerous notion that a new style must needs emerge if one applies construction in iron to monumental architecture'.(3) He was wrong on two counts. The train sheds have turned out not to be provisional, but have become some of our most cherished monuments, which we love because they celebrate with great panache the bravery of our ancestors in embracing the machine age.

Have we got any hope of acquiring similar daring and understanding of the nature of the places of transition in our own time? There are hopeful signs. Grimshaw's Waterloo is one, but the airport is the obvious new problem of our age, and it is at last emerging as a type. Modern airports started from improvised shambles (Heathrow, the world's busiest international airport, began as a huddle of tents on the western fringe of London just after the Second World War, and it often seems to have inherited their ad-hoc planning). From this they graduated to ill-advised monumentalism (who has not lost direction in the absurd circular plan form of Charles de Gaulle - Roissy I?). But now, from Foster's little Stansted (AR May 1991) to Plano's mighty Kansai (AR November 1994), a new pattern is beginning to appear. Airports are becoming places instead of maddening messes. The best ones share with Victorian railway termini a notion of clear progression; they are convenient and comfortable: they are in the best sense stations - establishments which from ancient times have been stopping places on a journey where stops are made for meals and a change of the means of traction (originally coach-horses). At their best, they have a figure in our culture as important as, if not more than, coaching inns of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

But while the inns were often the social focus of their towns, airports can never achieve the same status. Deyan Sudjic has advanced the rather dotty proposition that airports are the new city squares.(4) They can never be this, for by their nature they have to be out of town. They can never become social foci (who goes to an airport bar for a drink with friends, unless to take a plane?). Yet as our examples show, airports are becoming much more part of general civilised life.

More so are new bus and railway stations. These can, and must, be part of the city. In this area, we can show nothing in this issue as inspiring and inventive as Ralph Erskine's Stockholm bus station (AR December 1989), which unites in a memorably successful place two normally uncivilised building types: the greasy and windy bus station and the anonymous, dreary speculative office block. Yet, as this issue shows, humane architectural invention is at work elsewhere too.

Transport buildings are again becoming ports and stations in the best senses of the words: efficient places where the drama of moving from one mode of transport to another is celebrated in a way that ennobles the experience. Places where rites of passage can be properly celebrated. P.D.

1 See for instance his discussion of the relative merits of slow, reflective horse-drawn travel and the hustle and bustle of rail in The Stones of Venice, fourth edition, Vol II. George Allen, Orpington, 1886, p 1.

2 Semper, Gottfried Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Kunsten oder praktische Aesthetik. Frankfurt 1863. Trans Hanno-Walter Kruft A History of Architectural Theory. Princeton Architectural Press/Zwemmer London, 1994, p325.

3 Ibid.

4 AR January 1993, p15.