Airport Builders

by Marcus Binney

Airports are among the most complex and intensively used buildings of our time, designed for tens of millions of passengers a year and handling, largely unseen, huge quantities of baggage and freight. Speed and security are at a premium, and in the 1990s a much greater emphasis has been placed on fast public transport connections to nearby cities. As terminals grow to accommodate more passengers and planes, there is a constant debate as to how to reduce walking times to and from the planes. With many passengers also spending longer periods between flights there is a new emphasis on passenger comfort and a determined attempt to make airports attractive and exiting places to spend time in. Rarely has a single building type provided such opportunities for fine, adventurous architecture around the globe.

The airport terminals of the 1990s are engineering wonders, filled with natural light from above and with glass walls providing panoramic views. Their majestic internal spaces are worthy successors to the great train sheds of the nineteenth-century railway stations. Engineering and architecture play an equal role in creating vast, soaring internal spaces, exemplified by the new island airport at Kansai, Chek Lap Kok, and Seoul Inchon. Many buildings consciously seek to suggest metaphors for flight with soaring roofs and steelwork suggestive of fuselages or even the struts of early biplanes. While some terminals carry forward the twentieth-century tradition of a universal international modern style, others seek to give architecture a sense of place.

The race to build spans the globe from San Francisco and Vancouver to Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. This book illustrates the latest work of leading world architects such as Kisho Kurokawa, Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers and SOM. It charts the phenomenal success of specialist builders in the field, such as the worldwide practice of Aéroports de Paris, and examines the new generation of European terminals.

224 pages, Hardcover

First published March 17, 1999

Reviews

[Merline · Rating 3 out of 5]

Presenting the illustrations of airports, terminals... and stuffzzz designed by the "specialist builders" of some of the most well thought-out complex and modern mega buildings in the world which accommodate hundreds of thousands to millions of people per year with extensive facilities spanning across thousands of hectares of lands. It is interesting to see the differing philosophies behind the constructions of buildings like this such as what they call as "architecture parlante" which I supposed means the architecture speaks its purpose, and in this case, speaks of aircraft and flight. I find such certain buildings that infused the elements of aircraft design in it to be looking somewhat gibberish somehow. Perhaps I am not a fan of things that look everywhere cambered, or perhaps it's annoying to discover that some architects seem so hard at throwing aircraft elements in their design. Some however, would prefer to think that an airport can't be compared to a flying machine both in term of design and also materials.

Certainly, the gigantic structures made of sleek metal beams, struts, and squeaky kleen glass panes look impressive and spectacular, reflecting not just the "lightness" of flying machine, but also the grandeur of the aeronautical and aviation world, and human thoughts and the projection of their vision of course.