Travelling hopefully.

Travel is becoming more and more reductive, destructive and demeaning, partly because of the buildings associated with it. Architecture which serves travellers should be joyful and celebratory as well as functional.

Anyone who has travelled on the British railway system in the last few years will have noticed the way in which the authorities now refer to the people who are (usually) suffering from lateness, filth, surly employees, and a generally distasteful and mucky experience as 'customers' rather than 'passengers'.(1) The new lingo emphasises the relationship of the provider of' transport to the poor folk in the trains. A passenger is a person who experiences the moving (in all senses) experience of being taken from one place to another under someone-else's guidance. A customer is a much more casual person, engaging in no more than a process of buying a packet of detergent or kilo of apples. The sinister distortion of language is, of course, quite deliberate - an Orwellian manipulation of words by carriers to attempt to slough off responsibilities, ones that have been deeply built into cultural experiences of travel and our understanding of it since Charon started to row his boat across the Styx. And, though British Rail has been in the forefront of the fashion for reducing travel to the status of any other transaction, it is but the most obvious example of the tendency, partly because it was so scandalously deprived of funding and support prior to privatisation.

Passage should have its rites, even if these are as unpleasant as being pushed into a commuter train in the Tokyo suburbs or being cosseted in Concorde's supersonic cocoon. Thank goodness, most of us have to experience neither of these often, but the extremes make clear that the purchase of passage is not the same as a supermarket transaction, and that beginnings and endings of journeys are moments of great psychological importance.

Here, of course, we hit architecture and the relationship of stops and starts to movement, and their connections to the tissue of the places in which they are located. From earliest times, the places in which journeys began and ended have been made memorable and even celebrated. The hostelries and caravanserai of the ancient and medieval worlds remain to us in fragments, reminders of their importance in daily life and urban fabric. From the pattern of the monastery guest house grew the inns of the Renaissance. As travel became more mechanised, the functions of arrival and departure and of travellers' rest often became less integrated (though the great Victorian railway hotels are firmly in the caravanserai tradition). Partly because of this separation of functions, John Ruskin who lived through the transition from long horse-drawn journeys to steam traction was very critical of rail travel: 'The whole system of railroad travelling is addressed to people who, being in a hurry, are therefore for the time being miserable. No one would travel in that manner who could help it ... The railroad is in all its relations a matter of earnest business to be got through as soon as possible. It transmutes a man from a traveller into a living parcel. For the time, he has parted with the nobler characteristics of his humanity for the sake of a planetary power of locomotion'.(2) Ruskin could see no way of avoiding what he perceived to be inevitable disagreeableness of mechanical transport, and argued that stations should be as simple as possible, without any pretensions to what he perceived to be architecture because it would be grotesque to give such utilitarian places (which should be traversed as quickly as possible) the trappings of ornament and ancient culture.

Sixty years later, arguing from a very different standpoint, Antonio Sant'Elia echoed Ruskin's condemnation of applying traditional architectural forms and values to railway buildings: 'We feel that we are no longer the men of cathedrals and meeting halls, but of grand hotels, railway stations, vast highways, colossal harbours, covered markets, luminous arcades, straight lines and salutary demolitions'.(3) The Futurist language is very similar to Marinetti's who hailed the travel technology of the turning century with wonderful eloquence: 'We shall sing of the great crowds galvanised by labour, pleasure or unrest ... we shall sing of the vibrating nocturnal fervour of the arsenals and building yards ablaze with violent electric moons; of swollen railway stations, avid for smoking serpents; ... of bold steamboats scouting the horizons, of broad-chested locomotives pawing the tracks like huge steel horses bridled with pipes, and the gliding flight of airplanes'.(4)

The Futurist emphasis on surging masses, implacable machines with terrible beauty in their polluting exhalations and the magic of the most up-to-date seems absurdly anachronistic when applied to rail transport now, but our emotional responses to air travel are very similar to Marinetti's train-worship. Silver planes stretch their elegant vapour trails across the skies they are destroying; we almost revere the awesome machines, each one of which uses horse-power equivalent to that of the Roman Empire every time it takes off; and (at least in most airports) we become almost deprived of individuality, members of crowds subject to incomprehensible changes of movement and direction.

Ruskin's description of the traveller as 'a living parcel' remains brutally true of much travel today, and not just in planes and airports. Just as almost all long-distance public transport seems to approximate towards the condition of air travel, the treatment of passengers too often tends to that of their luggage in airport baggage-handling halls. The new generation of airport designs, that starts perhaps with Stansted (AR May 1991) and which emphasises clarity of progression to and from planes is a very welcome reaction against the bewildering directionless chaos encountered in many airports, particularly ones that were not planned for coherent expansion.

But clarity of progression is not enough. For instance, Heathrow's Terminal Four is a great deal more clear and easy to move through than the absurdly complicated accreted mazes of Terminals One and Two. But the experience of shuffling through Terminal Four's dreary utilitarian shed (designed by Scott Brownrigg & Turner and completed in 1985) is the reverse of enjoyable, nor is it in the least a suitable or welcoming prelude to one of the most exhilarating (and frightening) experiences of ordinary life. The place is a late twentieth-century embodiment of Ruskin's argument that the fundamental experience of mass travel is so demeaning that there is no point in trying to make architecture out of transport buildings. Thank goodness that since Ruskin wrote, so many other designers have treated his argument lightly(5) and have been concerned to make memorable places at every scale from the design of great termini like King's Cross and Grand Central to the creation of little metro stations and even humble bus-shelters.

In Europe and parts of Asia, terrestrial public transport, particularly the train, is undergoing something of a renaissance, and one that is likely to flourish, for it is becoming increasingly clear that the planet cannot sustain endless increases in private car use. More efficient, popular and widespread forms of surface transport are beginning to emerge. But partly as a result of more travel, the world is becoming increasingly homogenised, and to counteract the tendency, we need buildings which, without being kitsch or eclectic, have a sense of identity, and tell us where we are - buildings like the ones shown in this issue that can act as celebratory thresholds between the realm of travel and that of daily life. P.D.

1 The jargon started before British Rail was privatised, and these comments do not necessarily relate to what (so far) seems to have been a change of ownership that has added almost nothing to the experience of rail travel of most people, while adding a lot to the profits of a few.

2 Ruskin John, 'The Seven Lamps of Architecture', in The Works of John Ruskin, eds. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, vol VIII, p 159. The Seven Lamps was originally published in 1849.

3 From an essay in the catalogue of the Nuove Tendenze exhibition, Milan, 1914, quoted in Da Costa Meyer, Esther, The Work of Antonio Sant'Elia: Retreat into the Future, Yale University Press, New Haven and London. 1995, p142.

4 Ibid. Da Costa Meyer points out that she is not the first to have made the comparison.

5 But even Ruskin was prepared to admit that 'Railroad architecture has, or would have, a dignity of its own if only it were left to do its work. You would not put rings on the fingers of a smith at his anvil'. Ruskin op cit, p160.