CITYSPACE: TERMINAL FRUSTRATION

How did we land here? Airports were once conceived as beacons of the future. Now, they seem designed to impede the traveller and offend the eye

LISA ROCHON November 28, 2009

When they separated the women from the men, things turned ugly at Frankfurt am Main airport.

Three hundred of us, business commuters and sleep-deprived tourists, were crammed into a windowless room. We'd been trudging along the cattle lines for nearly an hour, and security officials were ignoring requests to move people ahead who risked missing connecting flights. Only four X-ray machines were staffed that morning. As the pace slowed from a crawl to a standstill, it became clear there weren't enough female employees to perform security pat-downs on female flyers.

Realizing I was about to miss my flight to Venice, I protested loudly about the absurdity of the system. The women behind me joined in. The security guards laughed at us. And, just to further the humiliation under the fluorescent lights, an armed police officer with grey wolf eyes appeared out of nowhere to stand a metre in front of me. That was when, in my mind, Frankfurt Airport became Frankfurt Alcatraz.

How did we land here? Postwar, airports were conceived as beacons of the future. Think of the sensuous swells of concrete by architect Eero Saarinen for New York's 1962 TWA Airport, now John F. Kennedy International. Implicit within the grace of those exhilarating curves was a spirit of optimism: space travel, the Jetsons, the arrival of Camelot. Badly designed airports, with endless underground corridors, and floor plans interrupted by stairs, elevators and ramps, are the curse of mass travel.

Somehow, over the last couple of decades, the elegance of air travel has been demolished. Gone is the notion that the airport is a symbol of seduction for the city that lay just beyond. Airports have become their own bloated cities, with restaurants, nail salons, enormous shopping malls and gated communities jealously guarded by first-class travellers.

I missed my flight to Venice, so there was plenty of time to think about airports these days. It seems that either you find yourself in a punishing, prison-like fortress such as Frankfurt's, or you land in an exquisite zone of high design, as I did a few days later in Zurich. There, floors are richly veined limestone; ticket desks are crafted in wood, with corners displaying intricate joinery; the interior is a composition of all that is modern and minimal. Passengers are separated into more intimate departure zones with smaller, fast-moving lineups. I nearly skipped through.

Based on my movements around the world, here are some thumbnail observations on the kinds of airports dotting the most intensely populated parts of the planet.

Light-filled, guilt-free shopping cathedrals
Since the 1990s, a new generation of airport has been designed with an epic use of glass and barely visible steel. There's more room to move, breathe - and, especially, shop duty-free. Kansai International Airport, a major hub for Asia, is located on an artificial island in Osaka Bay, Japan. It's designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano as a 1.7-kilometre-long structure curved to resemble an airfoil. Riding on its bright red people mover - the Wing Shuttle - is a dazzling experience.

The new Terminal 1 at Toronto Pearson, led by design architect Moshe Safdie, contains too many level changes, but its sky-high glass rooms and clean signage by Pentagram Design can inspire the world traveller. The monumental Beijing airport, opened last year in time for the Olympics, pursues a similar building type as that of Kansai and of Stansted (1991), a major hub for low-cost charters located northeast of London. At Beijing (designed, as was Stansted, by Foster + Partners), there's attention to a more sustainable terminal building, and a colour range that shifts from red to yellow as passengers move through.

Airports designed with some heart and soul
Scandinavia figured out a long time ago the value of an airport as a sensory experience. For one thing, it makes you fall immediately in love with the country. Danish architect Arne Jacobsen delivered the Scandinavian Airlines System hotel and airline terminal (1960) in Copenhagen as a Babette's feast of visual delights. He designed everything from the organically shaped furniture to the lamps, textiles and door handles. (The tableware was later used for the set of 2001:A Space Odyssey.) Travel to Scandinavia - whether Copenhagen, Oslo or Stockholm - to see what I mean. Everything from sensitively designed baby-change tables to wood flooring in Stockholm-Arlanda Terminal 5 is memorable.

Kuala Lumpur international airport (1998) in Malaysia, by the late Japanese star architect Kisho Kurokawa, is exhilarating and regionally inspired. The wood-clad parabolic roof presents as a series of tents or Islamic domes. Outside, the extended roof structure offers shade from the glaring sun.

Vancouver International is a standout for its use of wood, water and its display of aboriginal art, including Bill Reid's bronze sculpture, The Spirit of Haida Gwaii. The airport will create positive first impressions for those arriving for next year's Olympics.

Places to hobble the weak, the old, the exhausted
Here, my first nomination is Caracas, for the hoops, the paperwork, the special fees required to fly in and out of Venezuela - and because it's a death-defying trip to travel into the dangerous city from the airport.

For its enormous size and endless, exhausting corridors, there's the gargantuan Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, designed on a scale to damage the mind and body; it has a lot in common with Heathrow, Frankfurt and Paris Charles de Gaulle.
A saving grace at Schiphol: For those who discover that their flight has changed gates and that another half-marathon is required to relocate one's self, carry-on baggage and, perhaps, an ailing aunt, there are some very cool resting lounges. Under dimmed lights, framed by walls of dark wood, it's possible to bunk down in a well-designed chair and grab a nap. That's the kind of human gesture that architects of future airports need to observe, ingest and move ahead on.

In the meantime, I'm flying clear of Frankfurt.