[Reader-list] Centering the border?

[Nazneen Anand Shamsi]

Dear all,

Could a nation's border be located at the heart of a city?

Pasted below, is  a review of two books on cultural history of airports. The
review titled,  Dreams of leaving, explore questions not only about the
history of airports or what thoughts went into designing them but also
ponders about how have  nation states managed this international border
located in various cities. Consider this- 'between 1969 and 1978, there were
400 plane hijackings, quickly leading to a massive upgrade in security, and
a new paradigm in airport design.'

Regards

Nazo

********************************

http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2008/09/naked-airport-gordon-politics


Dreams of leaving

Owen Hatherley

Published 25 September 2008


Naked Airport by Alastair Gordon
Politics at the Airport Edited by Mark B Salter


One of the saddest stories of the 20th century is the fate of air travel. In
1900 it was a dream, feverishly speculated upon, subject to all manner of
Jules Verne imaginings; by 1999 it was a chore, a tedious, uncomfortable
ritual undertaken in order to get from A to B. A large portion of the blame
for this depressing non-event can be laid at the airport, that warren-like
combination of the shopping mall and the high-security prison, which is the
focus in Britain for a tortured air-angst every summer.

In 2008, what Evening Standard headline writers might pithily call "Heathrow
chaos" was centred on the botched opening of the new Terminal Five. Designed
by Mike Davies at Rogers Stirk Harbour, it was only the second aesthetically
distinguished structure at Heathrow - which ranges grimly from the
ridiculously inappropriate red-brick mannerisms of the control tower and the
original terminals to the claustrophobic hell of Terminal Four. Finally -
around 50 years after Owen Williams's brutalist BOAC hangar - a decent
building.

Inside, Terminal Five is majestic: a thrillingly Constructivist space, with
huge spans of glass and steel, open to the expanse of the surrounding
airfield. Yet within weeks of opening, 28,000 bags were lost, and 500
flights cancelled. And to ensure that people milling around in limbo keep
themselves busy spending money, the terminal only has 700 public seats.
Today, amid the airline bankruptcies, an advert declares "Terminal Five is
working", as if we should be impressed.

This tragicomic distinction between the airport as (sometimes) designed: as
metaphor for speed, transience and progress; and airport as used: as mall,
panopticon and fiercely guarded border, runs through Alastair Gordon's
brilliant Naked Airport. This is an impressively illustrated, comprehensive
"cultural history" of airports as buildings, from the earliest days of
makeshift sheds and hangars to the vast, glassy terminals designed by
architectural multinationals such as Foster + Partners. The book's narrative
begins two decades after the Wright brothers, and after the widespread
deployment of fighter-planes in the First World War. The airport became a
focus for speculation about design and modernity between the 1910s and the
1930s, appropriately at a time when architects were full of futurist
fantasies about cities in which flight and movement determined form.

Unsurprisingly, the earliest of these speculative schemes were those of the
Italian Futurists. The draughtsman Antonio Sant'Elia's still stunning cities
of ruthless modernity tended to feature airports in very inappropriate
places. Gordon notes that few architects had serious knowledge of the
mundane practicalities of landing and take-off. Le Corbusier, whose
insistence that "an airport should be naked" provides the book's title,
proposed that an airport be at the heart of a city, much like a rail
terminus. In his 1922 design project, "Contemporary City for Three Million
Inhabitants", the airport is at the centre of a Cartesian grid of
skyscrapers, with the planes flying dangerously close to the glass walls.
Meanwhile, actual flights and actual terminals at this point were a strange
combination of shabby and aristocratic. Lindbergh's transatlantic flight
ended with his landing on a mud track, while early flyers were almost always
members of the upper-crust, usually either Americans taking advantage of the
Monroe Doctrine to laze in the Caribbean, or British and French travellers
sunning themselves in the colonies. One decidedly racist 1920s poster for
PanAm depicts a grinning black porter taking the bags of stylised, glamorous
figures.

The Jazz Age's flappers and flyers travelled through shoddy airfields, via
clumsily neoclassical terminals. Gordon argues that the first place truly to
find an appropriate form for the airport was Europe. Glass and concrete
created calm, rationalist spaces, without unnecessary reference to past
forms. By the 1930s, Amsterdam or Hamburg were leading the world, making New
York and Washington, for all their surface glitter, look staid. Gordon
devotes a whole chapter to the Roosevelt administration's interventionist
response. Massive public spending and nationalisation created a network of
publicly owned fac ilities such as Washington's "People's Airport". These,
although they still hedged their bets stylistically between reassuring
classicism and vertiginous modernity, were at least vastly more efficient
than their colonial-style precursors.

Gordon notes that, as ever, war was a motor for technological progress in
airport design, particularly in the Axis countries. From 1936,
Berlin-Tempelhof was the world's largest airport, in a modernised classical
style that would be dubbed "Luftwaffe Modern", as nobody was in any doubt
about why Germany needed such a huge facility; and in early 1940s Italy,
Pier Luigi Nervi designed intricate, gravity-defying han gars that would
greatly influence a generation of postwar architects.

The author also finds intriguing material on the camouflaging of American
airports, against the Japanese or German attack that never came - disguising
them as residential exurbs, which in turn gave way to actual exurbs growing
round the naked airports themselves after the war. The most fascinating
chapters are those that deal with the postwar years, where within a decade
the airport went from the most optimistic space in America to the site of
hijackings, security and surveillance.

Naked Airport has much on Eero Saarinen's breathtaking TWA Terminal at JFK,
a swooping expressionistic fantasy - not only does a brief autobiographical
description of it open the book, but a chapter on the "Jet Age" features
incredible illustrations of this improbable building. Designed as a gigantic
concrete bird, it provided the most emblematic structure of a semi-fictional
world of allegedly willing air hostesses, fetishistic synthetic uniforms,
and wildly futuristic designs. Today, it serves as the unacknowledged
blueprint for the career of the currently fashionable Spanish
engineer-auteur Santiago Calatrava. Yet between 1969 and 1978, there were
400 plane hijackings, quickly leading to a massive upgrade in security, and
a new paradigm in airport design. Gordon claims that the manager of
Dallas/Fort Worth took as a model an advert depicting a passenger moving
seamlessly from car to port to plane, without any contact with the outside
world.

After the shock of terrorism, and Jimmy Carter's deregulation of US
airlines, airports became stealthy, paranoid structures, centred on shopping
and surveillance. The book outlines how easily the 9/11 hijackers passed
through security, so another level of increasingly tedious and invasive
frisking and scanning arrived in the aftermath. Meanwhile, the seemingly
more optimistic models - the glass hangars of the 1990s and into the 21st
century, by Rogers, Foster, Calatrava et al - have their own sinister
underside. Gordon notes that Chek Lap Kok, Foster's huge Hong Kong sky-city,
was constructed by helots, whose standard of workmanship was unimpressive -
within a year, the building was a laughing stock. The constant expansion of
the airport is as spatially rapacious as it is ecologically disastrous, to
the point where it becomes difficult to pinpoint exactly where it begins and
ends, as anyone disturbed by the in-train films and muzak on the Heathrow
Express train will have noticed.

The extremely bleak prognosis that ends Naked Airport is shared by Politics
at the Airport, a collection of academic papers edited by Mark B Salter.
>From the start, the editor (unfairly) classes Naked Airport as a work of
technocratic boosterism, and the book sniffily dismisses Marc Augé and J G
Ballard's ambiguous eulogies to airports as seamless, transient, clean and
serene "non-places" as the perspective of the privileged. Instead, Salter
and his contributors - mostly specialists in the study of surveillance and
security - concentrate on the spatial politics of the airport after 9/11.
Politics at the Airport stresses that, in Deleuze and Guattari's terms, the
airport both "deterritorialises" and "reterritorialises".

It might appear to the frequent traveller as a smooth international zone
under a steel and glass canopy, but to the asylum-seeker or the terrorist
suspect, the airport is an effective high- security border with attached
prison. Colin J Bennett's essay notes that the US government's lists
prohibiting flight have included Bolivia's socialist president Evo Morales,
children, and anyone with the name David Nelson. Gallya Lahav writes on how
an intricate system of private-public partnerships means an all-pervasive
retail obsession coexists with the armed might of the state in the same
space. Others profile the recent use of a "biometrics" that makes the body
itself the locus of security, with passengers being identified by scans of
the iris - it seems airports are taking their inspiration from Philip K
Dick's stories of non-people condemned in non-places.

Politics at the Airport's blizzard of acronyms and academic name-checks
belies its importance as a reminder that the airport is a deeply sinister
space, no matter how much architectural "transparency" might try to restore
some of its tarnished glamour. The final essay, Gillian Fuller's "Welcome to
Windows 2.1" takes a critical look at the Foster/Rogers rhetoric of
transparency, which "alternates between an illuminating display of what was
previously hidden to the dark suspicions of 'what have you got to hide?'''.
With that, we're back at Terminal Five, glassily housing a source of
environmental catastrophe, central to a society of shopping and
surveillance.

Naked Airport: a Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary
Structure

Alastair Gordon University of Chicago Press, 320pp, £9

Politics at the Airport

Edited by Mark B Salter University of Minnesota Press, 240pp, £12.50