The Secret to Good Airport Design: Aesthetic vs Efficiency | Architectural Digest

Most people don't want to spend more time in an airport than they have to. That makes efficiency the number one job for airport design. 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 going to 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 have 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. People, bags, and flights. 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. One level is for bags. One level is for people. Airplanes are very tall. 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. Kennedy International. 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. And in fact, he couldn't even draw it. 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 in many ways is even more exciting than the exterior. I mean, it's incredible, actually. 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 glamour of air travel in the early 1960s. The era of President John F. 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 got to 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 want to 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 want to 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, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects. Here's everything that jumps out at me. 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. In fact, it's nicknamed the starfish. 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 lattice work 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. Well, this is it from the interior. 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. One thing grows out of the other. So clearly the experience of being here was forefront in the designers' minds. The idea was, let's create an amazing place to be. Okay, so let's talk about Zaha Hadid. Truly one of the great architects of the late 20th and early 21st century. She was hugely influenced by a group of artists known as the supremacists, who were Kazimir Malevich, El Lissitzky, and Leobov Popova. They were called that because they were interested in the supremacy of pure artistic feeling, as opposed to just the visual depiction of objects. And Zaha was also a painter. Through her paintings, she explores spaces that architecture hasn't considered before. So these paintings foreshadow her early built work, such as the Vitra Fire Station in Switzerland, and the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, which are all very hard-edged and rectilinear, and don't employ those soft curves yet. At the Maxim Museum in Rome, she starts to soften her form and creates these more curvilinear shapes, which over the years leads to the astonishing forms that she employs at Dajing. Sadly, she died in 2016 before its completion, but her stamp is all over it. And truly, she's one of the great architects of the 21st century. But Dajing is not just beautiful, it's also extremely efficient. So this aerial view really shows the efficiency of this radial hub-and-spoke concept of which this airport is designed. So basically, what this hub-and-spoke concept means is that no gate is too far away from the center. In fact, it's only an eight-minute walk to the farthest end of each one of these piers. So this concept is incredibly pedestrian-friendly because it means you don't have to walk all these great distances like you do at other airports. For instance, at Dallas-Fort Worth, it's over two miles to the furthest gate, which is 40 minutes of walking time. So this radial concept also means you don't need other forms of transportation to get around the airport. You don't require buses, shuttles, or trains. Of course, this shape, which is so efficient for passengers, is actually a somewhat common arrangement for terminals. So Dajing, although it's radial, is actually based on the pier concept. And the pier concept, when arranging an airport terminal, is basically just a linear pier like you would find at a marina with boats. But in this case, it contains planes, and the planes just all, you know, sit here like this. So at one end is the terminal, and a string of gates come off it along this pier concept. And then the jetway goes to each one. So what happens at Dajing, they take this pier concept, and they just do five of them coming off the same terminal, which again makes this extremely efficient for people inside the airport to get to where they're going. Of course, there are other common configurations, and probably the earliest configuration was just the linear concept, where you have an airport, and here's your terminal, and then your gates are here. And then you have a plane here, and a plane here, and a plane here, and they're all just arranged in one linear row. Then, of course, there's another configuration, which is known as the satellite configuration. And the satellite configuration is essentially a total separation from the terminal. So you have your terminal here, and then you have your gates out here. So the advantage of the satellite configuration is that the tarmac is uninterrupted, and the planes are closer to the taxiways and the runways. The other advantage of it is it's more efficient, and you can get more planes along the perimeter of the building. So while it's more efficient for the airplanes, it's less efficient for the passengers. And actually, the next airport we're gonna look at combines two of these ideas to really maximize the efficiency for the planes. This is Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta, Georgia, and it's actually the busiest airport in the world. In fact, it's the only airport that has ever served over 100 million passengers in one year. One of the reasons why this is the busiest airport in the world is that 80% of the U.S. population lives within a two-hour flight of this airport. And if designing an airport is a series of decisions between aesthetics and efficiency, every decision they made here at Hartsfield is the complete opposite of what they did at Da Jing. At ATL, efficiency for flights beats everything else. So this is what makes it so efficient for flights. They combine two of the configurations that we just looked at. You get planes on either side of this linear form, and they use them as satellites so that they can get as many as they can, and the tarmac is uninterrupted. What that means is that any of these planes can reach any of the five runways in a very short amount of time. But the trade-off here is that unlike Da Jing, which has a short walk to any gate, here the connections between terminals are underground and require passengers to take elevators or escalators down, board a train, and then take an escalator or elevator back up to the level of their flight. It's a clever solution, separating the traffic vertically to allow maximum flexibility for flights, but it also adds multiple modes of travel within the airport itself. You take three or four different types of transportation just to get to your fifth airplane. So the sacrifice here is that you're hopefully spending less time in the airport overall, thanks to its efficiency, which should mean fewer delays and shorter waits for flights. But the time you do spend here is not visually inspiring in the same way that it is at TWA or Da Jing. So while it is maximizing efficiency for flights, there is a trade-off with the experience of actually being in the airport. So let's take a closer look at the terminals. So this design really harkens back to the original ideas of airports, when they were just these very efficient, utilitarian spaces made to get people on and off their airplanes. And you could actually see the planes, the jetways, and the actual terminal building right here. And that terminal building is here in this photograph. And you can see there's really not much to it. It's just basically an aluminum box with corrugated metal along the outside, the occasional window, and that's it. There's very little natural light. It couldn't be more mundane if it tried. And the interiors are exactly the same way. So what I love about this is the terminal looks like the warehouse buildings that you see surrounding airports, in that they're built for completely utilitarian and efficient reasons and nothing else. This airport is built entirely for function, and that function is getting airplanes in and getting airplanes out. Unfortunately, one pays an aesthetic price for that efficiency. So what is the secret to good airport design? I think it's about striking a balance between efficiency and an aesthetic experience. The reality is the nature of air travel now means that you're going to spend more time in the airport than you really want to. So you might as well be in as nice a building as you can be in. But no matter how nice that building is, you still want the airport to run efficiently, and you don't want to spend more time there than you have to. So there has to be a sweet spot between the two, and that is the nature of good airport design today. So what's your favorite airport and your least favorite airport? Let us know in the comments below.