Name: 「機能性vs美しさ」建築家が語る、良い空港の法則｜WIRED Japan
Uploaded: 2025-02-09T10:10:09.000Z
Duration: 16 min 39 s
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Most people don't wanna spend more time in an airport than they have to.

That makes efficiency the number one job for airport design.

Adverbs of degree

But for the time you do spend there, you want it to be pleasant, comfortable, and maybe even beautiful.

Hi, I'm Michael Weitzner, and I've been an architect for over 35 years.

And today we're gonna be talking about the secret to good airport design, and why it's so important to balance the expediency and experience of your time in the airport.

First of all, airports originally were designed primarily just for function.

They started as military and government facilities, which were just hangars and sheds and dirt landing strips in a field.

As flight became more accessible and more people traveled by plane, airports needed to be much larger to accommodate the demands for all these new passenger flights.

They now needed to include spaces for check-in, baggage claim, gates for waiting at, and food service and other retail.

I mean, the idea of a large airport was a totally new typology.

They could've made them look like train stations, but they didn't.

They were searching for a new language for their design.

They maintained some of that utilitarian feel because efficiency and cost were still factors.

But at this point, most of them just ended up looking like office buildings.

At that point, efficiency became even more important than before.

Airports needed to accommodate, and still do, three modes of traffic.

And the way they did this was to separate the passenger traffic vertically based on whether you were arriving or departing.

So typically, airports are designed on two levels.

So typically, when you enter the airport for your departing flight, you're entering on the upper level because that's where you enter the plane at.

And when you arrive at your destination, typically, you were on the ground level because that is the level in the airplane that the bags are located in.

And so, those bags come in directly, and you grab your bag and go out to the street level to get your taxi, your Uber, or your Lyft.

As airports continued to grow, they became more complex.

Not only in their configurations, but in the variety of spaces that they offered.

Airport security began to take up a much larger footprint, and over the years, food service and retail became a massive part of the floor plan.

Travel efficiency and retail economics were the main factors in airport design for many years.

But the aesthetic aspect of their design didn't progress beyond imitations of office buildings until one specific terminal significantly changed the dynamics of airport design, driven more by aesthetic and the experience of visiting the airport itself, rather than treating it just as a transitional space between a car and an airplane.

And the turning point in this aesthetic evolution can be traced back to a single terminal that was completed in 1962 at what was then called Idlewild Airport and is now called John F.

This is the TWA Flight Center, designed by Eero Saarinen.

So Saarinen had just completed the General Motors headquarters in Michigan, which had gotten a lot of acclaim and a lot of attention.

He designed a lot of very unique buildings, all different from one another, including the hockey rink at Yale University.

So Saarinen was chosen for this project because he was known as a visionary.

No two buildings he did were ever the same.

And he was actually designing another very famous airport called Dulles Airport outside of Washington at the very same time.

And for this project, he wanted to design a building that evoked the excitement of air travel.

So what Saarinen did to evoke this idea of flight was he created these swooping, grand curves and lifted them up, almost like wings would lift up above this portion of the building.

And he almost created what appears to be like the beak of a giant bird.

And to some, that was a little too picturesque, and he was actually criticized for it.

But there's no denying that this building itself, the interior as well as the exterior, evokes the idea of taking off and flying through the air.

And what's most remarkable about this is this was done in an era before computers.

So all this was designed, as it were, by hand.

The building has these multiple compound and complex curves.

They basically just kept building model after model after model, and then they drew that.

So let's take a look at the interior of the building, which is in many ways, is even more exciting than the exterior.

He creates these extremely dynamic, swirling forms on the interior.

And then the roof of this building, which comes down and forms the walls and the entire enclosure for the interior, is actually made of four separate folded shells.

And he separated each of these shells with this linear skylight.

And for me, this sort of represents the pinnacle of the glamor of air travel in the early 1960s.

Kennedy, the space race, the innocence before Vietnam, still basking in the victory of World War II.

And I think this building by Saarinen contributed more to that feeling than any other building of the era, in that it's the expression of flight and the sense of discovery that comes with air travel.

So the way Saarinen designed this airport was, there's this great terminal, but then you've gotta go through these long tubes to get to these gates where the planes are to board your flight.

You could see the tubes clearly here and through this window here.

So when you get off your flight, after coming out of this tube of an airplane, he brings you into this other tube, this really evocative, almost like the esophagus of a giant animal, that you walk through, and then you emerge from this tight, dark space into this bright and luminous airport terminal.

Saarinen created this place that you weren't meant just to walk through, but you were actually meant to linger and enjoy and get a sense of the excitement of air travel.

Typically, when you arrive at an airport, the last thing you wanna do is linger.

I mean, it's been hours since you got in the car or the train that brought you to the airport until you waited, until you got on your flight, until your flight finally landed.

So the first thing you wanna do is get to the baggage carousel as quickly as possible, collect your belongings, and be on your way.

You don't linger to look at the architecture, but occasionally, one is struck by something amazing, and that's what happens at TWA.

You come out of your plane into this long tube, which brings you into this amazing space below, and it gives you a sense of what a great airport can be.

Suddenly, you realize you're in a new and exciting place, and that's what a great airport can give.

Some other airports that have also created this feeling are Barajas in Spain by Richard Rodgers, Kansai in Japan by Renzo Piano, the Jeddah Airport in Saudi Arabia by SOM, and Dulles Airport, of course, outside of Washington, D.C., also by Saarinen.

The thing about air travel today is it's extremely safe and extremely affordable.

So because of all this, people are spending more and more time at the airport, and so one would like them to be as beautiful as possible.

So now let's take a look at an airport that takes that idea even further, Daxing International Airport in Beijing, China.

So this is the largest airport building in the world, it was designed by Zaha Hadid Architects.

First off, it's the massive scale of this building.

The building footprint is so large that the runways almost look diminutive in comparison, and it obviously takes a lot of cues from what Saarinen did at TWA in terms of its plastic curves and organic shapes.

It almost looks like some sort of living marine creature.

The other way in that it relates to TWA is that it also has these linear skylights, these separation of the shells.

So in a way, it's this series of boomerang shapes, these parabolas, that all sort of meet to form this radial construction.

And in the center, there is this latticework of this amazing skylight, which we'll show you from within.

And speaking of skylights, each one of these little domes are actually skylights.

And in fact, if you look at it from the roadway, it looks very reminiscent of the TWA terminal at JFK.

And you can see it with this large overhang, and the way the form lifts up and it's filled in with glass below is very reminiscent of what Saarinen did at TWA.

But it's not just beautiful on the outside.

This building is really quite incredible from the interior.

So these two photos give you a great view of the interior and the skylights that flood it with natural light.

And I mentioned the vortex at the center of this form, that lattice skylight.

And you could see the linear skylights that separate each one of those parabolic boomerang-like shapes from one another.

And this is one of those small, almost elliptical-shaped skylights that you saw from the roof.

And it just gives you an idea of the massive scale of this building, that that tiny little oval that we saw on the roof is actually, compared to a person, is an enormous size.

And you could see the excitement on the interior.

I mean, this actually, you know you're at an airport.

Here's the check-in counters, here's baggage.

And then here you see all these amazing shapes.

And I love that she did this suspended arch, which looks like it's just floating in midair.

And then she suspends the bridge from it.

It's this dynamic, amazing environment that totally envelops you, where it's hard to distinguish between floor, wall, and ceiling.