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[Nirali Shah]

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Nirali Shah









On Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 7:02 PM, Naeem Mohaiemen
<naeem.mohaiemen at gmail.com>wrote:

> Thanks Nazneen for posting very interesting review of the two airport
> books. I paste below an excerpt from the statement for a project we
> had proposed to Danish Arts Council a few years back: "Grounded".
>
> <<Temporality is overcome by what is a less-expansive form of HG
> Well's time-travel. International date lines allow us to advance or
> regress when we land in a new country. Long journeys mean that we
> "lose" or "gain" a day, provided we fly far enough. This transition
> across time is assisted by sleeping aids that try to "correct" our
> circadian rhythms. Even as flying becomes more complex, we go to great
> lengths to wrap ourselves in a cocoon of comfort and amnesia.
> Elaborate "sedative" distraction systems (eye masks, ear plugs,
> headphones, cabin socks, warm face towels, in-flight movies, gourmet
> meals, wine, and duty free shopping) cushion flight time and distract
> us from the reality of tensile pressure points and random events
> (mysterious accidents like TWA 800 and Egyptair 990). For the
> wealthier passenger, there is also the idea of hassle-free air travel
> as an exclusive service: air taxis for businessmen and special lines
> that bypass security lines for "pre-checked" individuals. Contrast
> this with the massive global flow of working-class immigration, most
> of which still travels by car, bus, train, ferry or ship. The vast
> majority of the world has never even boarded an airplane.>>
>
> > 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 andnationalisation 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
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> >
> > End of reader-list Digest, Vol 63, Issue 23
> > *******************************************
> >
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