PROFESOR ESCUELA SECUNDARIA

The airport terminal is an emergent building type of the twentieth century and its typology evolved in parallel with the institutionalization of modern architecture. Yet the exceedingly modern airport terminal constitutes a blind spot in most accounts of the rise of architectural modernism. It was technologically too modern and stylistically not modern enough to be recognized by the historians of the modern movement. Instead, historians centered on the idea of a “new tradition” and emphasized architecture that translated existing building types into the modernist idiom. This changed only after the

377 DFW incorporated some interesting landscape and artistic ideas that emerged from Robert Smithson’s artistic survey and compliment the overall structure of the airport. Building for Air Travel 1996, 146-149; Pascoe 2001, 92-97.

378 Building for Air Travel 1996, 173.

379 Bosma 1996, 57-60.

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sixties when the typology of the terminal building stabilized sufficiently to suggest criteria for the evaluation of technologically advanced and aesthetically modern terminals.

Postwar terminals were not only functional airport architecture but designed by second-generation modernists along the (often International Style) modernist idiom.

As Banham argues, new building types such as the railway station, the elementary school, the medical hospital, the elevator office block and the modern dwelling were factually employed to justify a “new tradition” in the discourses of modernism. Yet, in the case of some new building types (such as the atomic power station) only a few magnificent examples existed as fast scientific and technological development made these buildings obsolete by the time of their completion. Typically these new building types – including the airport terminal –also emphasized utilitarian building and functional improvement over spectacular form giving.³⁸⁰ Each architect designing an airport terminal had to balance between aviation technology and modern aesthetics. Advances in aircraft technology, however, did not determine the aesthetics of the terminal building, but were rather incorporated in its functionality.

Indeed, in terms of airport architecture, function (or functional) is the most relevant term in the vocabulary of modern architecture. Functional, which in the discourses of architectural modernism became synonymous with modern, was actually derived from three German words: sachlich, zweckmässig and funktionell. As a condition of art, Sachlichkeit (‘thingness’) referred to the aesthetics of ornament free, rational, scientific, and modern construction. Zweckmässigkeit, on the other hand, referred to the purpose (Zweck) of the object and its inner organic meaning or function. Significantly it did not imply the constructional rationalism or mechanics of structure developed in modern engineering (Realismus in German), but was rather the rational expression of the use (function) of the object. Funktionell (functional) described the effect of action, and in particular, the interrelations of the parts and the overall structure. Function thus signified the inner idea of an object that defined its organic shape, in the same manner as Louis Sullivan’s “form follows function” emphasized function as metaphysical organic form.

But functional never had an overreaching theory and it were rather the histories of modern architecture that made it synonymous with modern.³⁸¹

Regarding the airport terminal “functional” had all the above connotations. While the functional success of an airport was relatively easily measured by the ease, speed and efficiency with which it handled traffic flows, the appropriate architectural expression of a functional airport was much harder to define.³⁸² In some buildings functional meant the aesthetics of ornament free, rational modern construction, in others the rational expression of the use of the building as a transportation hub or terminal station. The functionality of the airport infrastructure was measured by the interrelations of the parts to the overall structure as this resulted in free circulation of passengers, goods and aircraft, and quick turnaround times. It was only in the fifties that the airports became complex industrial enterprises facilitating interchange between air and surface transportation in an

380 Banham 1975, 18, 25.

381 Forty 2000, 174-195.

382 Bosma 1996, 52.

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arrangement, where the airfield consisted of the apron, the runways, the taxiways, and the terminal building. But the airport is not just infrastructure. Rather it is an organic entity adapting pre-existing infrastructure into the requirements set by new technologies, economic trends, and social dynamics³⁸³. It incorporates functionally diverse space (reserved for ticketing, security, immigration and traveler’s services) and transit zones (for fuel, food, cargo, baggage, and planes) into an architectural entity.

Aesthetically speaking the airport is not unlike other modern building types since the majority of twentieth century architecture was not modern, but rather traditional. Even buildings that looked stylistically “modern” were often not constructed with modern materials and construction techniques due to building regulations and financial constrains restricting their realization.³⁸⁴ In fact, traditionalism was superseded by modernism in several countries and building types only after the Second World War.³⁸⁵ The airport terminal was no exception and International Style modernism prevailed in airport architecture only after the war. However, modernist tendencies were always visible in the short history of the building type. Therefore some of the airport terminals discussed above (such as Stockholm-Bromma or Copenhagen-Kastrup) could have easily been included in the histories of modern architecture had they been analyzed in relation to period architecture, while others (such as Roosenburg’s Schiphol Airport) suggest the canon be expanded to include previously neglected variants of modernism.

A close study of the typological instability of the airport terminal –which exposes its alternative development trajectories and a plurality of technological possibilities – questions techno-determinism inherent in the narrative of official architectural modernism.

In this sense the airport terminal “uninvents” modern architecture. Histories of modern architecture shared a determinist belief in the evolution of technology as a logical and unquestionable process guided by rational selection. Yet in reality this selection was shaped by many factors including socio-economic processes, politics, culture, and chance.³⁸⁶ Therefore, the technological evolution trajectory imagined by the modern machine utopia did not exist. Neither did architectural modernism, nor the typology of the airport terminal evolve logically along a linear development pattern. Among other factors, institutions involved in the planning –and specifically their socio-economic interests – were decisive factors in the development of certain aircraft technologies and terminal typologies. The typological development of the airport terminal was a result of the networks producing it.

Science and Technology Studies scholar Madeleine Akrich proposes a method of “de-scription” to analyze the relation between the form and meaning of a technical object – such as the aircraft or the airport, understood as a large technological system. According to Akrich design involves a hypothesis about the entities that make up the world, assumes a technological trajectory, and defines actors with specific competence and motives. This vision is inscribed in the technical object and negotiated between the inventor, and the

383 Pascoe 2001, 11, 14.

384 Banham 1975, 30-34, 40, 43.

385 Hitchcock 1987 (1958), 530, 531.

386 MacKenzie 1990; MacKenzie 1996.

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assumed and the real user. This is why it makes sense to say that technical objects have political strength: they stabilize, naturalize, depoliticize, and translate social relations. In other words, they imagine and produce users. After a certain technology is accepted, the processes involved in its construction are concealed and the causal links it established naturalized. Akrich discusses technological transfers between developed and developing areas, but this type of analysis is equally descriptive when one thinks about an emergent building type. The typology of the airport terminal evolved through negotiations between imagined and actual users, and involved knowledge transfers between designers in various geographical locations. It is in this sense that the airport terminal, along the aircraft, imagined and produced the modern traveler.³⁸⁷

Yet history seldom discusses how objects construct or alter subjects and other objects.

Instead, this history is traced in silent physical reminders such as pumps and stones, technical devices, and forgotten objects. Objects shaping architecture do not have a role;

they hardly exist in architectural history.³⁸⁸ Nothing of the aircraft or air routes remains in the history of modern architecture and hence it seems that only men, not the aircraft, shaped the architecture of the airport and its terminal building. But if air routes are defined as a technological network similar to gas lines, sewage pipes, railroad tracks, electricity networks, and telephone lines, they appear as architecture branching across space. To follow Latour’s thinking air route networks are not unlike “nets thrown over spaces and retaining only a few scattered elements of those spaces. They are connected lines, not surfaces.”³⁸⁹ Hence, air route networks are not comprehensive, global or systematic even though they are laid over mapped surfaces and extend over long distances. Instead, each connection is a transfer and each movement in the network documentable. Airport terminals form nodes in these networks and function as points of transfer.

The network of airport architecture and air routes redefined the modern world and society. Without the aircraft it would not have been possible to win World Wars, transport food and people and goods swiftly to remote places, bring cultures together, or create global networks. The aircraft transformed architecture because it redefined distance, produced a new building type, introduced the air view, and altered the way cities and traffic networks are laid out. It remapped the world into a network of locations defined by the range of the aircraft and the location’s relative importance as an international hub.

Hence, the aircraft was a nonhuman actant expanding its network in a process that misplaced and translated other actants.³⁹⁰ Airport architecture was constructed in a network including but not limited to the laws of nature, aircraft and other technologies, materials, the imagined and real users of the airport, and architecture’s discursive practices. Hence, the airport terminal is simultaneously a material object, a social object, and a discursive object, a hybrid of sorts.

387 Akrich 1992, 205-222.

388 Latour 1993 (1991), 82.

389 Latour 1993 (1991), 118.

390 John Law writes about sea routes as traffic networks seen as actor-networks in a similar manner in Law 1987, 111-134. See also Law 2002.

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Because of aviation, people imagined the world and themselves differently. The airport terminal imagined –and actively produced –the modernity of the international community of travelers moving within the network of air routes. But the sleek lines of curtain-walled glass towers heralded in the dominant discourses of architectural modernisms did not have anything to do with aerodynamics and aviation. The intermingling of interior and exterior space through the transparent curtain wall was a far cry from the movement of an aircraft through clouds, its takeoff or landing on the runway, the taxiing of the machine to the gate and the circulation of passengers in carefully orchestrated sequences through the gangways into the terminal, customs clearance, luggage claim and ground transportation.

The organization of the terminal space incorporated the machine, the luggage and the traveler and melted various nationalities and ethnicities into a uniquely international, modern experience. The airport terminal expressed a modernity experienced by an individual profoundly altered within the specific processes of modernization. These included technological advancements shrinking time and distance, migrations enabled by modern transportation infrastructure and the international networks of travel. It embodied the modernity of the air age and celebrated its transitory and nomadic nature.

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