AIRPORT STUDY
that have been researched and noted by a number of other studies. What I would add to this is to show the tremendous effort that is involved in shaping the transition from ‘landside’ to ‘airside’. Remember that these terms do not mean much to an average airport user. They don’t know when the queuing will stop, or what is just around the corner. One has to therefore think very carefully about architecture, design, and aesthetics in order to help people get in the mood to relax or to shop.
Is an airport an expensive place to live? Not for the experience. Not in my book, anyway. It’s one thing paying 50 pence for a bottle of water whilst stood in a bus shelter by a busy main road; quite another to pay say £1 to sit back and relax and watch the flicker of the runway lights as they dance with the early dawn sunshine to frame the slow-motion take-off of a B747 and to follow its flight and eventual disappearance over the horizon into an infinite void!
What was your opinion of airports before the experiment? My fascination with airports and the airport terminal started long before I decided to take up residence in one, and I think I share this excitement with many others. Whether I was running to catch a short-hop business flight or slumped in a leather armchair for several hours whilst waiting for a transatlantic holiday flight, I have always been intrigued by all the twisting corridors and walls, the constant ebb and flow of people in all kinds of different uniforms, and the polyglot of languages and cultures that all pass through the same space. What were behind those walls? What were all these people doing? For me this stimulated a mixture of fascination and fear that included the excitement of take-off, escape, vacation, and to ‘throw it all away’ – with the possibility that one could leave behind this earth-bound terrestrial mortal coil and ascend into the lap of the Gods!
62 AIRPORT WORLD/AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 2010
Do you still feel the same way? I am still fascinated by airports and the coming together of people from different walks of life. Last night, for example, I saw dinner being served by a young Polish waitress to a senior executive of one of Britain’s multinational companies on his way to a business meeting in China. Getting to know these people helps you realise that the airport is in many ways a ‘microcosm’ or what I have called elsewhere a ‘miniature’ of the world around it – with all its vitality and inequalities, ambitions, desires, and change – with some people in the ascendancy and others spiralling downwards. The whole mass of humanity passes through the gates of an airport and for brief moments in these spaces one can sense that the whole world is connected.
What’s the most surprising new fact to date you’ve learnt about life at an airport? The financial implications and statistical correlation that exists between runway maintenance schedules and the mating habits of the Great Crested Newt!
Do you have a favourite airport and why? For me, it’s the airport in the mind – one that survives as a mixture of Saarinen’s TWA terminal and the visions of future airports imagined at different historical time periods by visionary architects and designers. The designs that came out of the otherwise highly deranged and surreal imaginings of the Italian futurist movement in the early twentieth century are particularly interesting in this respect, and might still teach us something about future airports in the 21st Century. I’m often surprised that people who work at the airport do not have a favourite airport – I think there might be some value in making this question obligatory in selection interviews for jobs at the airport.
What do you think you will personally gain from the experience? Sensitivity and appreciation for the many kinds of people that work at an airport.
AW
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