Meet the new airport: temple, mall, design hub

The Vancouver airport, on which his firm worked, has won accolades for its airiness and views of the mountains. The new Denver International Airport, with its circus-tent-like fabric roof evoking the Rocky Mountains, is another that gets praise for its manifestation of "place."

Similarly, a sense of place is part of the design here in Toronto, where work is under way on what is known as "Terminal New." This is the eight-story building that is the centerpiece of a 10-year, $3 billion airport development. A pinkish-gray granite wall, a sort of geological allusion to the Ontario escarpments, is planned for the area between ticketing and departure gates.

Bruce Kuwabara, an architect with the Toronto firm of Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg, says that the architecture of airports is finally catching up with that of other fashionable venues for leisure activities, such as cutting-edge restaurants or hip boutique hotels à la Ian Schrager of Studio 54 fame.

One of his favorites is the Hong Kong airport terminal, designed by Sir Norman Foster. "It's so beautiful and understated," he says. "It's got a lot of vaults that create a sort of ripple. It's not just one big volume."

The modern conception of an airport, Mr. Kuwabara says, "is more a public building than a machine for processing people."

But alas, airport authorities and airlines do tend to think of "processing" passengers. Tim Goodyear, a spokesman in Geneva for the International Air Transport Association, the airlines' trade association, cautions: "There's sometimes a mismatch between architectural dreams and economic reality." Given the need for airports to be expandable, he adds, "if you want to talk about 'airport as temple,' you also have to think about knocking down a cathedral wall and adding a couple of extra chapels."

Toronto's multiphase expansion program, for instance, foresees handling up to 55 million passengers a year sometime after the year 2020.

"The function of an airport should drive the form," says Mike O'Brien, director of airport development for IATA in Montreal. But too often, he says, "functions end up being secondary to the architectural concept." Some of best-functioning airports, he suggests, have the simplest designs. Singapore's Changi airport, for instance, "is a fairly basic concrete building, with wide corridors, plants and greenery, good lighting," he says. "It's a calm, restful, and structured environment."

As Gottdiener puts it in his book: "The best of the new airport spaces foster a contemplative atmosphere that massages fears rather than forcing passengers to confront them. With a strong sense of place and an increasing mixture of malls, hotels, entertainment facilities, workout rooms, chapels, and upscale dining, the best of the new air terminals are places in which people can spend considerable time, despite the ordeals of boredom, layovers, and canceled flights."

Terminal designers are facing up to the fact that the "kinetic elite," as frequent travelers are called, may have a lot of "dwell time" on the ground before them, and it's in everyone's interest for that time to be well filled.

One phenomenon no one who has flown recently can have missed is the airport-as-mall concept. Taking advantage of a captive audience, caught between security checkpoint and departure, airport shops have been raking in "spectacular returns," says Peter Behnke of the Airports Council International, the trade group for international airport authorities. This is despite - or perhaps because of - the introduction of "main street pricing" policies intended to assure shoppers that merchants aren't taking advantage of their captive status.

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