Enormous structures tend to be built to last. Airport terminals are usually the reverse
Greater effort must be made to retain decommissioned airport terminal buildings, writes Anthony Paletta.
The legacy of a new airport exerts a magnetic lure in the minds of nearly every politician, not least president Trump. His call for the redesign of Washington Dulles Airport elicited a number of proposals last week. It also has prompted alarm about the fate of Eero Saarinen's superb 1962 terminal at that facility, given the president's disinclination to wait for conventional building approvals or retain historical features otherwise.
When it comes to airports, this is one destructive tendency that's not purely confined to the Trump administration, but is near-ubiquitous. Enormous structures tend to be built to last. Airport terminals are usually the reverse.
It's a profligate tendency in a sector whose core undertaking is already hugely carbon-intensive
There's a sort of Marfan's syndrome for megastructures at work, exceeded perhaps only by sporting arenas by the standards of prodigious waste. There are much sounder reasons than new luxury hospitality boxes why airport buildings are replaced, and yet it's a profligate tendency in a sector whose core undertaking is already hugely carbon-intensive.
There is no shortage of recent instances of this phenomenon. Notably, Pittsburgh International Airport (pictured top) closed and replaced one of its principal airport terminals in November. Was this a creaking relic of the age of De Havilland Comets with a maximum baggage allowance of a carton of Lucky Strikes? No, it was a youthful 33. There are jet models still in widespread service older than this terminal; the Boeing 767 dates from 1981.
There have been a handful of exceptions, of course. Berlin is the champion, retaining the principal terminals at its ex-airfields at Tempelhof and Tegel. Efforts to keep elements of existing structures in rebuilds have also picked up; ZGF's fantastic mass timber terminal in Portland, Oregon reused about 500,000 square feet of its predecessor. Vilnius might easily have demolished a 1956 Soviet Neoclassical terminal, though it's happily been kept in a new Zaha Hadid Architects design.
But if you're seeking examples of the pattern of waste you can likely just look to whatever airport is nearest you. Of the 1.5 million square feet of original terminal space at JFK, built between 1959 and 1969, under 650,000 square feet remain, in the form of the TWA Hotel in the terminal building designed by Saarinen. The rest is gone.
There are logical reasons why this has happened, much of which have to do with exponential increases in use over time. Early commercial aviation involved positively quaint passenger capacities. The jet age was a leap forward in plane size which brought regular additional leaps in its wake. The Boeing 707 accommodated under 200 people. The Boeing 747 can get to 660. The Airbus A300 had seating for under 250. The A350 can reach nearly 500.
Larger planes don't just require larger gates, they require more of everything. They require larger seating areas, larger restroom facilities, larger concession offerings. Baggage handling systems, usually buried intestinally, would frequently just become overwhelmed by these deluges. Not to mention increased transit infrastructure to support passengers leaving and entering airports; a terrific amount of rebuilding happens to congested road links to airports.
You can see security checkpoints today still awkwardly crammed into all sorts of airports
Increasing security infrastructure, especially after 9/11, provided yet another stress that buildings were ill-equipped to handle. You can see security checkpoints today still awkwardly crammed into all sorts of airports. Saarinen's TWA Terminal had lost much of its luster jammed up with functions in its later active decades; IM Pei's sadly deceased Sundrome at JFK was also eventually a cluttered mess.
Pittsburgh's terminal was a rare case of a facility being not too small, but too big. The airport was built originally to serve as a US Airways hub. Its design, by that city's foremost modernist Tasso Katselas, was innovative. It included a landside terminal for travellers to enter and exit, linked by an underground people-mover to an X-shaped midfield terminal, which could then utilize all of its exterior perimeter for gates.
Shifts in fortune saw first the hub disappear and then US Airways itself. An airport that handled 125,000 flights a year shortly after opening was down to under 50,000 a year more recently.
It was inconceivable that most of the airport's gate space would ever return to use, while the facility was also saddled with a fixed cost of $4 million dollars a year to operate its people mover. The new terminal, designed by Luis Vidal + Architects and Gensler, is adjacent to the midfield terminal, resulting in a more compact ensemble suited to current reduced use requirements.
Unfortunately, this has left the prior terminal – a very appealing postmodern structure – shuttered and beached like a 650,000 square-feet whale amid the airport's approaches. We don't know what's next for it. The airport's masterplan has pledged an effort to find some use for the facility, but also notes that "if no viable re-use can be found for the existing Landside Terminal, it will be demolished".
There is ample cause for concern on this point. Pittsburgh's own prior airport terminal sat decaying for years before demolition. New Orleans' former terminal has been gathering dust since 2019. Milwaukee has had a concourse empty since 2017, now to be replaced, naturally, by something new. San Antonio is set on the bulldozer. Numerous former facilities are now empty lots across the world.
Airports don't usually attract all that much popular preservation interest
There are unquestionable challenges in repurposing large buildings built for very specific uses – and yet the overwhelming impression is that airports just rarely try very hard to overcome them, save under specific and sustained pressure. The exceptions required effort. The TWA terminal at JFK weathered years of risk before its glorious incarnation as a hotel. Newark Airport has retained a beautiful art deco terminal as offices but the replacement of its midcentury terminal A garnered little attention.
Aside from very rare exceptions, airports don't usually attract all that much popular preservation interest. They're functionally out of easy daily sight; you never walk by them on the town square. And good luck holding a rally to preserve a building inside an airport without a ticket.
The aviation buildings that seem to have proven easiest to preserve have been where entire airports are decommissioned. For instance, Croydon Airport, once the UK's main international airport, is now a business center.
Denver's former Stapleton Airport is now a mixed-use neighborhood, containing a brewery in its former air-traffic control tower and a church in a former hangar. There are similar relics in Austin, Panama City, and even a Disney use in Glendale.
The more difficult task seems to be putting unwanted facilities at existing airports to some new use. But given the centuries of embodied carbon that most airports contain, it's a vital undertaking.
Secondarily, it is tedious to travel in an eternal present. We are in old railroad stations all the time, why air travel should always seem semi-recent is often due to colossal failures of imagination. A Robert Sowers stained-glass piece from JFK has ended up dispersed in pieces (you can still buy some). It would have been simpler to retain that in a large public building where anyone might see it, no?
Anthony Paletta is an architecture journalist based in New York City. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Bloomberg CityLab, The Architect's Newspaper and Metropolis, among others.
The photo is courtesy of Luis Vidal + Architects.
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