Meet the new airport: temple, mall, design hub

The airport has finally arrived.

For years, airport terminals were mostly strings of cramped, stuffy little buildings that were continually added onto like a child's Lego construct; they had about as much architectural significance as a prefab garden shed.

But a major wave of airport construction and expansion around the world in recent years is giving many cities terminals that are veritable temples of travel. Airports worldwide will invest about $450 billion in infrastructure improvement projects over the next decade, according to Manfred Momberger of Momberger Airport Information in Rutesheim, Germany.

They are the aesthetic equivalent of the cathedral-like railroad stations of yore.

"Airports are our most visible public buildings," says Stanis Smith, head of Architectura, a Vancouver architectural firm that is a leading player in airport design. "They are the first and last impression of the city for visitors and locals."

"We're seeing an air terminal as a new kind of space," says Mark Gottdiener, a sociologist at the University of Buffalo. "New airports are airy, with large windows, connecting the air side with the land side. Airports have architecturally come into their own."

And not a moment too soon, either, he clearly feels. As the title of his new book, "Life in the Air: Surviving the New Culture of Air Travel" (Rowman & Littlefield), suggests, he takes a rather dark view of the contemporary passenger experience.

It is precisely because today's air travelers are under so much stress that architecture is hugely important, he emphasizes. The "visual connection" that good airport design makes - that supports what Mr. Smith calls "orienting and way-finding" - helps travelers understand where they are and where they are going, and can reduce the stress.

On one hand, Professor Gottdiener notes, air travel has "exploded" to nearly 700 million passenger trips annually in the United States and 3 billion globally. Here in Toronto, traffic through Lester B. Pearson International Airport, Canada's busiest, has expanded from 19 million passengers in 1989 to nearly 29 million last year - the equivalent of nearly the entire population of the country. What's more, traffic was up another 7 percent this past April over the year before.

"Air travel has become the major means by which people connect, not only on business trips, but for vacations and to see relatives," says Gottdiener.

All this may sound like good news, but it has its down side in terms of congestion, scheduling caprices, and other woes besetting the traveling public. "The system is strained to its limits and beyond," Gottdiener says. A particular hot button for him: a new tendency of airlines not just to delay flights but to cancel them outright, leading to legions of stranded passengers. "Customer rights are being violated," he says. "This is a national issue."

All the more reason to want the airport to be a pleasant place to hang out, rather than just a cluster of Quonset huts or a sterile, hypermodern wonder of technology. Indeed, one of the trends is away from the high-tech concept, which Mr. Smith says has been "overdone." "We're far more interested in soul, in character, in Gemütlich-keit, in a sense of place," he adds, in a phone interview as he is in the air on the way to Frankfurt. "We've tried to do this in each of our projects," he says, mentioning Edmonton; Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt; and Santiago, Chile.

Page: 1 | 2