Few designs in the history of American technology have been so costly, so successful though so spurious as that of the Municipal Airport of New York. Its statistics are spectacular: it was the largest airport project ever funded by the State, from its conception in 1937 it went way over budget but was finished on time. After its opening in 1939, the airport was instantly acknowledged and praised technologically,
as one of the most advanced airports in the world; it also succeeded socially, as LaGuardia himself advertised it as an airport open-to-all for enjoyment and entertainment; and the Skywalk patented that assertion. But after just one year the complex was working at full capacity, so in 1941 plans for a new airport began.
There is then a strong contradiction between the rapid technological obsolescence of a technological artifact (the airport in this case) and the warm
response of its audience (the public and passengers); one would expect the opposite: if a technology is welcome it will last longer. But this does not necessarily make a rule of thumb. Even though members of social groups may show a high “rate of adoption”
(Rogers, 1962, p. 22), technologies could fail because they were thought of as closed systems that cannot be updated or expanded. Nevertheless, LaGuardia Airport can be considered a monumental techno-political device and one of the biggest triumphs of the American Sublime (Nye, 1994).
I think it fair to say that the ingenious arrangement of the terminal layout was a vivid example of an intense transitory moment where aircraft and airport systems started to put pressure on the landside–airside divide. As I have shown, politicians, designers, and engineers agreed to the negotiation of a subtle, well-balanced solution, carefully avoiding preference for the emerging systems over people’s customs, and in that sense it became a soft transition and not a drastic one, as many visionaries
forecasted. These actions had a clear political value that was capitalized by LaGuardia himself.
As I suggested in this chapter, it is at the Skywalk that two historic cultures clash: the openness of the airfield versus the restrictive nature of the modern airport.
This collision remained imprinted in language expressions that went out of use as well as those that remain valid in our times. I could maintain that LaGuardia Airport is hardly a modern building in its essence, but its gestures and unprecedented features
were indeed revolutionary for their time (the separation of departures and arrivals on two levels) and set the basis for the new relationship between users and aircraft.
In Nye’s terms (1994), the dialogue between spectators and airplanes represents yet again the temporary celebration of the sublime:
The technological sublime does not endorse human limitations; rather it manifests a split between those who understand and control machines and those who do not. In Kant’s theory of the natural sublime every human being’s imagination falters before immensity of the absolutely great. In contrast, a sublime based on mechanical improvements is made possible by the superior imagination of an engineer or a technician who creates an object that
overwhelms the imagination of the ordinary men. (p. 60)
The sublimation of the airport does not come from the architecture and has little to do with the terminal building.
But without the Skywalk nothing near to sublime could have happened there; it offered the possibility to extend the imagination of the common person into the world of aviation, and only then, the sky-walker dreams. The bold and sober invitation read that on October 15, 1939, at 2:30 p.m., the Honorable Fiorello LaGuardia would see his dream come true. The special guests would be theatrically received by the landing of the latest aircrafts over the reliable airfield, and the deplaning of invitees and exotic tourists. “There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and a gentle, northwesterly breeze blew across Flushing Bay” (Gordon, 2004, pp. 110–111, 116). For the opening day in October 15, 1939, an attendance in excess of 325,000 (see Figure 1.7) celebrated LaGuardia’s triumph (New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, 1980, p.
2). “The extravaganza is on the boards twenty-four hours a day and has a cast of thousands, a great parade across the largest sky port of them all” (Gordon, 2004, pp.
110–111, 116).
Just a few days after the opening ceremony, the Board of Estimate elected, with a vote of twelve to one, to rename North Beach Airport to LaGuardia Airport
(this decision was later endorsed by Commissioner McKenzie; “Backs LaGuardia as Airport Name,” 1939). As I mentioned in the first sections, “years before the ‘practical use’ for the postal service, military and commercial aviation, the flying man-machine myth was largely seen as public spectacle. Spontaneously, people greatly celebrated takeoffs and landings with gigantic welcomes and parades, and this fact originated a profitable industry of entertainment” (Wohl, 2005, pp. 294–301). But the flying man-machine was about to perform for the last time, during the Second World War.
Figure 1.7. This plate of LaGuardia Airport pictures the hundreds of thousands gathered at the opening day. Photo: Levin & Salzberg (1939) “LaGuardia Airport
dedication,” Legacy of FDR, http://newdeal.feri.org/images/ac18.gif Shadows of war were threatening from across the ocean, but neither Mayor LaGuardia nor Postmaster General James A. Farley admitted that the airport would
ever be anything but a place of peace. “It is fortunate for us here in the United States that we can gather to dedicate an airport of this character to the pursuits of peace without thought of war, of conquest, of the dread possibility of armed conflict,” said the Postmaster General (quoted in Arend, 1979, p. 21). He hoped the time would never come when the airport would be needed for military purposes. “This airport is a strong guarantee of the nation’s peace and safety,” concluded Farley (quoted in Arend, 1979, p. 21). Along the same lines, Washington National was built just one year after its northern cousin, and it represented a refinement of LaGuardia’s scheme and its landside–airside boundary.
Nonetheless, the dialogue was finally broken. William Delano and George Licht designed a new scheme for Idlewild Airport in Queens, now known as JFK. The beautiful illustrations by Hugh Ferris speak for themselves; borrowing from the
dramatic portico at Tempelhof and perhaps influenced by the monumentality of Albert Speer’s masterpiece Zeppelintribüne, Delano offered a more refined, operatic version than his Skywalk in LaGuardia. In his plans for Idlewild, the architect delivered a more direct, open contact for the air-minded spectator; but at the dusk of the Second World War the grim shadow of national security darkened the skies, and Delano was forced to break his relationship with the Port Authority in 1948. LaGuardia and Washington National became the last true examples of the romantic borderline. As air travel became a risk-free activity, these two airports became congested and thus obsolete. As Saint-Exupéry predicted, without risk “La Ligne”35 was dead, and with it, much of the romanticism of an epoch. As the airport reached the end of its first cycle, the modern landside–airside frontier was finally born.
35 “La Ligne” refers to “The Line,” or the earliest French airmail system—established through an incredibly dangerous trajectory between Toulouse and Santiago, and later known as the Aéropostale (Wohl, 2005, p. 201). The author of “The Little Prince” thought that it was risk, and not necessarily the need to deliver mail, that moved those pilots.
CHAPTER TWO:
“Reinventing the Airport?”: Annex 14, Dulles Airport’s “Mobile Lounge” and Other Jet-Age Paradigms, 1946–1962
Figure 2.1. Artist rendering of Dulles Terminal by Eero Saarinen. This is one of the few modern buildings ever depicted on a U.S. stamp. “Dulles Airport Washington
DC,” 1982, retrieved from http://airportstamps.webs.com/images.htm
When authorities were studying plans for Idlewild Airport (1940-43), NY Art Commissioner William Delano suggested some motorized transportation from terminal to plane. Nevertheless, his suggestion was thought too radical . . .
—Sunday Star, Washington, DC, November 11, 1962
In this chapter I speak, in seven sections, of two themes that are interlocked between each other: the context of airport planning after the Second World War and, in consequence, the second reinvention of the airport at Dulles.
More in detail, in the first four sections, I frame in general the problem of planning and designing airports in the postwar period. First I present the impact of the ideology and the discourse of the postwar period; second, I comment on the
formalization of airport planning as a profession and describe some of the
methodological concepts, mainly from S&TS, that I use as tools of analysis. Third, I describe the importance of language in the early days of expert planning, and fourth, I argue that the airports of the 1950s and 1960s gained “momentum” in the optics of Hughes’s “large technological systems model.”
In sections five to seven, I develop the case study of Dulles International Airport in Washington, DC, which was planned and built between 1958 and 1962 (see Figure 2.1). In section five I present the result of my bibliographic and archival
research (based on both primary and secondary sources) of the second reinvention of the airport, this time at the request of the U.S. President’s Office and through the FAA.
In section six I discuss the process of reinvention and the birth of the “Mobile Lounge,” and last, section seven addresses the materialization of a new kind of landside–airside boundary at the new Washington airport.