Centre for the Displaced: In praise of architectural neutrality in the airport terminal s3317506 RMIT University Semester 2, 2011
Abstract Since the invention of the airplane in 1903 and the jet airliner fifty years later, air travel has become a worldwide phenomenon. In Melbourne, over 27 million passengers were processed in 2010i, and within the next three years the total global number of air passengers is expected to exceed 3.3 billion annuallyii. The airport is comprised of a continually fluctuating population of displaced citizens, a heterotopiaiii that represents both a point of departure and a point of arrival; a gateway to the city and a gateway to nowhere. The terminal becomes a manipulating container for the processing of bodies; that is, the registration of deportees, and the quarantined analysis of those just arrived. Exposed to highly stressful conditions – cramped, pressurised interiors, high altitudes and consistently noisy atmospheres - often for comparatively lengthy periods of time - the international arrivant is tired, stressed, anxious, and excited: brimming with affect. The airport terminal, a micro-city of a “roiling maelstrom of affect”iv, must dampen behavioural friction in order to impose a sense of authority and order. This essay seeks to examine the spatial strategies employed in the (inherently) generic airport terminal in order to reveal an insight into architecture’s ability to manipulate and neutralise affect. It will reference Brian Massumi and Nigel Thrift on Affect, Michel Foucault and Marc Augé on the non-place, Peter Adey on the spatio-psychology of the airport, drawing on three contemporary airport precedents before a brief conclusion.
Introduction The airport plays a significant role in society today. Demand for air travel has never been greater, and the airport acts as the critical point of transition for the traveller. With thousands of airlines now operating across the globe, innumerable flight destinations available to the consumer, and annually billions of flying passengers, the airport typology evidently represents a complex and highly utilised organisational machine. Along with this complexity, air travel itself has become a stressful and increasingly elaborate process, requiring many hours of the passenger before and after their immediate flight. Before departure, the passenger is expected to attend check-in, bag drop, security and immigration control, as well as customs, luggage collection and quarantine on arrival. The airport terminal is the backdrop and host of this fluctuating population of tired and stressed passengers, displaced from their homes and cultures. As Michel Foucault would state, the airport terminal represents the quintessential heterotopia: a defined place and simultaneously non-place “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place … several sites that are in themselves incompatible”v. The airport functions as a place in that it processes and securitises displaced passengers, while also a form of non-place in that it behaves as a transitional container, identity-less and thus belonging to no particular culture. Recent academic essays have tended to criticise this modern non-place culture, promoting (what I would argue as) naively nationalistic attitudes towards the importance of cultural meaning in all of the built environment. Contrary to this position, I suggest that the success of the airport typology is primarily due, in fact, to its very placelessness, acting as a form of neutral territory designed to dampen crosscultural conflict. Thus the aim of this essay is twofold: firstly, to acknowledge the role of the airport terminal as the archetypal 21st Century non-place: an entity that collates, organises and disperses migrant bodies without any particular cultural value. And secondly, to identify the way in which its ‘non-place’ architecturality is intentionalised, enabling it to act as a pre-emptive suppressor of affect and thus reaffirming its position as a purely transitional entity. While it is acknowledged that the airport represents a highly complex infrastructure, for the purposes of brevity this essay chooses to examine specifically the airport waiting lounge typology. Three contemporary airport precedents are examined in-passing before a brief conclusion.
That Place Called the Airport The airport is a highly contemporary architectural typology, made commercially relevant during the second half of the twentieth century. One only needs to view annual passenger trends to recognise the increasing relevance of the airport as a critical piece of city infrastructure. In the US alone, 172 million passengers were recorded in 1970, compared to 757 million in 2008vi. By the year 2013, the total global number of air passengers is expected to exceed 3.3 billion annuallyvii, representing almost half the world’s population. The pressure exerted on airport infrastructure has never been greater. Historically, the first purpose-built commercial airport was designed and constructed in 1922 in Konigsburg, Germany, following the end of World War Oneviii. The first passenger airports were owned by local municipalities, symbols of modern progress and places of genuine civic pride. They were destinations in their own right. These were radically transformed in the 1970s with the introduction of wide-body, long-range jet aircraft. The Boeing 747 allowed for a drastically liberated airline industry, with economies of scale allowing for cheaper flights, carrying more passengers to more destinations. Cultural Geographer Peter Adey suggests that at a similar time, the airport ‘hub’ model emerged, in which major interchanges were constructed - increasing waiting times during travelix. Anxiety over security, triggered by international terrorist attacks, has in many ways transformed the postSeptember 11 airport into a mechanistic filter. Meanwhile, the increasing privatisation of the airport (as an industry unto itself) has prompted yet another transformation – turning large components of the terminal into, moreorless, a form of shopping mallx.
Indeed, with such a variety of programs - waiting areas, retail, security filters, and, increasingly, numerous other leisure activities – the airport terminal represents a highly composite organism of programmatic complexity and disjuncture. In his seminal essay ‘Of Other Spaces’, Foucault describes the heterotopia, a non-hegemonic- place and non-place:
... in every culture, in every civilisation, real places – places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society – which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted... heterotopias. The contemporary airport is the heterotopia par excellence, real in that it exists as a three dimensional entity, but unreal in that it is a “placeless place”, a utopian enactment of a multiplication of fragmentary programs, juxtaposed against one another regardless of their compatibility. A more recent examination of the ‘non-place’ has been documented by cultural theorist Marc Augé. He argues the non-place (“the real measure of our time”) manifests the culture of supermodernityxi, writing:
If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a nonplace. The airport, in this sense, is heterotopic in that it combines seemingly contradictory events inside a single, non-hegemonic institutional form, but also a non-place in that it is devoid of cultural meaning. As Augé notes, “anthropological places create the organically social, so non-places create solitary contractuality”xii. The airport’s relative meaninglessness thus discourages ‘organic’ behaviour. But should the airport promote Augé’s idea of the “organic society”? If we are to accept the basis of the airport as an infrastructural device for the processing and ordering of travellers, is there a need for an airport architecture that confirms a sense of place or territorialisation? Certainly, airports play host to ever-changing participants who are constantly in-transition from one destination to another. But with international travellers from all kinds of religions, ethnicities, ages, indeed cultures, should the airport typology as a place of transition evoke a sense of placeness, of projecting cultural or nationalistic dominance?
Spatialising affect Before we can deduce the appropriateness of ‘placeful’ or ‘placeless’ airport design, we must first consider the contemporary understanding of Affect and its role in shaping spatiality. The term Affect essentially refers to the abstract process of transition within a subject. To quote Human Geographer Nigel Thrift, it is “the space of time which shapes [a] moment”xiii. If we were to label such a moment as an ‘Event’, we could deduce that Affect describes the transition of one Event to another. That is, that each and every Event is part of a “reflexive loop”xiv, constantly affecting each other and producing new eventualities. The terms ‘Event’ and ‘Affect’ have so far been used in an abstract manner. Of particular importance to this discussion is the applicability of Affect to notions of human behaviour. One way in which Affect manifests itself, writes Thrift, is in the form of human emotionxv. This is to say that individuals affected by a shocking Event express themselves, involuntarily, through emotion. Consequently, the emotional individual is able, by their very nature, to affect others around them. We can thus see a pattern emerge, in which the emotionally respondent individual, affected by their shock-inducing environment, is able to transfer their emotionality into a new event, a new kind of shock.
Within the airport, there is a certain inevitability that airport passengers - stressed from long waiting times, lack of sleep, security probing etcetera – are emotionally active. These stressful events can be collectively viewed as those that precede and inform user emotionality. That these stressful (affective) events all take place within the airport terminal, and that the terminal acts a collector of emotional beings, allows us to deduce that the airport ultimately acts as an intense condensation of Affect. The critical aspect of the concept of Affect is that, firstly, it represents a philosophical interest in not so much events as the dimensions of change that influence and are caused-by events. Secondly, and more importantly I would argue, is that a consciousness of Affect potentially allows one to take hold and manipulate it. By recognising that the airport is a condenser of Affect, we can see the importance of architectural design in neutralising this, avoiding emotional outbursts and thus scenes of potential conflict. Thrift discusses this notion of the manipulation of affect in his article Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect. Using the Military Drill and the television media as two critical examples, Thrift demonstrates the way in which two (albeit completely different) manipulated mediums affect their user groups. The Military Drill, as a simulated enactment, conditions and desensitises soldiers to scenes of battle, whereas the television Media are able to (at least partially) condition their audience through the technological manipulation and reorganisation of virtually captured political events. Architecture too can be viewed as an affective, conditioning medium. In the context of the airport terminal, host to a flurry of emotionally charged (and therefore highly affective) passengers, the terminal architecture is able to strategically manipulate space to achieve a desired atmosphere.
Spatial Strategies for the Airport We have so far deduced that the airport, recognised as a non-place by its multiple functionalities, contains a highly charged body of affected and affective beings. Additionally, we recognise the role that non-human mediums (critically, architecture) can play in manipulating this affect. The final aspect of this essay is in recognising the spatio-psychological interrelationship of the airport lounge architecture and its occupants. Functionally, the airport lounge acts as a buffer zone within the terminal. It is a waiting place immediately prior to aircraft boarding that comes chronologically after check-in and security. As we have already deduced, the waiting area must accommodate functionalities that neutralise its affected and affective users, often for extended periods of time. In his article Airport Geographies of Spectatorship, Position, and (Im)mobility, Adey suggests three key techniques used in airport design that seek to neutralise the terminal’s users. These include the Window, the Screen and the Spectacle. Seen within the context of Affect theory, we can deduce that these architectonic devices are used as Affect suppressors: distracting, entertaining and comforting the passenger body. By pre-empting conflict, the airport attends to the needs of its potentially- or alreadyirritated users. It neutralises the possibility of the stress-inducing situation, therefore offering a totally streamlined functionality. The terminal window, the first of three of Adey’s identified critical devices, allows views to the exterior environment. The transparency of the window glazing, by its very nature, offers degrees of visibility out and over the airport apron, making visible the movement of aircraft against the horizon. The window also works to perceptibly expand the spatiality of the terminal, disguising its actual interiority by creating the illusion that it freely connects to a landscape beyond. Seating arrangements, usually sideon to the window, are arranged such that every user is able to attain a view outside. In this sense, the window offers both a scene of (expressed) freedom, perceptibly liberating the user from the confines of the terminal, and also allows for the movement of aircraft to become a source of distraction.
Figure 1 Melbourne Airport terminal windows create the illusion of an unrestricted interior
Renzo Piano’s design for Kansai International Airport extremifies this position. Conceived as a cylindrical tube of structural steel and glass, the main passenger terminal reads as a singular, 1.7kmlong concourse of waiting area. Aligned parallel to the airport runway, the interior ultimately offers little else apart from its view.
Figure 2 Renzo Piano's scheme for Kansai Airport reads as a 1.7km-long concourse of waiting area with views over the aircraft apron
Screens, the second of Adey’s noted devices, offer a mode of “informational architecture”. They create a sense of security and comfort, reminding the user of their flight status, gate number and departure time. They are most plentifully located close to the terminal’s retailers, psychologically drawing its users toward the most bustling – and for the airport, most profitable – regions of the terminal. The screen then acts as the attention magnet, pulling its viewers into a spectacular, bustling environment. Thirdly, and following this notion of the Screen, Adey discusses the notion of the spectacle in the airport. By this he refers to the human dynamic that takes place inside; the sheer movement of bodies, of multiple ethnicities, clothing types, colours, and appearances creates a distraction unto itself. The
terminal interior, he describes, is a “mobile drama whose actors and spectators are interchangeable”xvi. The dynamic between the spectator and spectacle, he argues, is ever shifting, prompting a continuously reflexive system, both voyeuristic and visually magnificent.
Figure 3 Singapore Changi T3 resembles a spectacular shopping mall anchored by the information desk and flight data screens
Tony Bennett labels this mode of spectatorship as the Exhibitionary Complexxvii, which operates as a form of communal security - an inverse, if you like, of the Foucaultian panopticon model. This system relies on the continuous re-assessment of the subject versus the collective, creating a self-regulating system of communal subjugation. This idea is made most apparent in the works of Bernard Tschumi, whose own unbuilt conceptual scheme for Kansai Airport relies on principles of collective visibility. In the design, Tschumi accentuates the terminal’s circulatory elements, creating two major circulation ‘wings’ on either side of a central mixed-program axis. Like many of his projects, Tschumi’s scheme emphasises the movement of human traffic within the terminal interior. Through the mixed arrangement of the airport program, unusual visibilities would be permitted between not only the arriving and departing passengers, but also guests of the airport hotel, shoppers, and those undergoing security processing. By creating strong visual connections, created through the absence of architectural form or structure, and arranging the program in an intentionally hybridised manner, Tschumi’s scheme illustrates – if only on paper – the way in which the movement of terminal users forms its own kind of spectacle, distracting and entertaining its user group in-waiting.
Figure 4 Tschumi's conceptual scheme for Kansai emphasises visual connectivity through programmatic overlap
So far we have spoken about the role of the Window, the Screen and the Spectacle, identified by Adey as the most critical aspects of the airport’s neutrality. In addition to this, I would argue, are the formal and material qualities of terminal design. Architectural debate today seems highly critical of the legacy of modernism and the International Style. Indeed the corporate, functionalist image of architecture pervades contemporary airport design, no matter what city, it seems, one finds themself in. But in some respects this is not be a bad thing. The very repetition of the terminal typology – each employing a similarly systemised interior, with material and structural commonalities (typically steel, concrete and glass) and a kind of unanimously nonoffensive Cartesian formalism, gives the airport a reassuring consistency. It allows the passenger to pre-empt their arrival experience regardless of geographic location. In other words, the calm consistency of the airport architecture is crucial for its role as a geographic mediator, disguising, through sheer material and formal banality, the very uniqueness of the visitor’s cultural setting.
Mutualities of airport architecturality and modes of control The airport terminal, beginning as a celebrated public meeting point, evolved to accommodate greater user demand, as well as commercial and security-related objectives. Recognising air travel as having become a stressful and protracted process, involving queuing, probing, interrogating, scanning, and confinement in cramped, pressurised interiors – we identify the need to control passengers and neutralise the threat of conflict throughout the duration of travel. Outside of the airplane, the airport is the point of transition and the container of this user group. The terminal architecture, as a place for the passenger to compulsorily wait, must therefore intentionalise its spatial configuration to provide amenity, entertainment and distraction, neutralising its occupants’ emotionality in order to avoid behavioural outbursts, or worse, conflict. In addition to conventional security methods, we have identified a number of architectural techniques that achieve means of control: entertaining, distracting and comforting. Firstly the window, providing a contemplative view of moving aircraft, visible from all areas of the lounge. This works to disguise the true interiority of the airport, creating the illusion of an unrestricted landscape beyond. Secondly, the placement of retail and informational screens to promote consumer spending, itself a form of entertainment. Thirdly, the self-organising spectacle of the passenger population, rendered visible by the vastness of the terminal interior and of course aided by the addition of retail and (quasi-) public amenity. And finally, the neutrality of the architectural form and materiality, creating predictable and mentally comforting interiors regardless of geographic location.
Of course, the very hybridity of retail, public, security, infrastructural and corporate typologies into its architecture renders the contemporary airport a Foucaultian ‘heterotopia’ or Augé ‘non-place’ by default. Indeed, we have seen that there is a particular inevitability about the airport’s consistent realisation. Although they may subtly differ in logistical configuration and size, these identified architectural techniques are, by and large, repeated in nearly all contemporary airports. We can see a particular mutuality between the architecture, its interior configuration and its inherent need to manipulate and neutralise its users in an otherwise onerous and potentially conflicting environment. It seems the airport terminal, a centre for the displaced, relies on modernist architectural objectives for its very operability. Its non-place architecturality is critical to its success.
Melbourne Airport. 2011. ‘Melbourne Airport Soars to 27.7 million passengers in 2010’, viewed on line 16 August 2011: <http://www.melbourneairport.com.au/News-Events/Listing/Overview/Melbourne-Airport-soars-to-277-million-passengers-in2010.html> ii BBC News. 2010. ‘Airline profits to fall as fuel costs rise, says Iata’, viewed on line 16 August 2011: <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12446045> iii Foucault, M. 1986. ‘Of Other Spaces’ in: Diacritics, Vol. 16, No. 1, pp22-27 iv Thrift, N. 2004, ‘Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect’ in: Geografiska Annaler, 86B (1), pp57-78 v Foucault, p25 vi Beaureau of Labor Statistics, 2011, ‘Career Guide to Industries: Air Transportation’, viewed online 28 August 2011: <http://www.bls.gov/oco/cg/cgs016.htm> vii BBC News. 2010. ‘Airline profits to fall as fuel costs rise, says Iata’, viewed on line 16 August 2011: <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12446045> viii Rumerman, J. 2011. ‘Airport Design’, viewed online 28 August 2011, <http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/Social/architecture/SH15.htm> ix Adey, P. 2007. ‘’May I Have Your Attention’: Airport Geographies of Spectatorship, Position and (Im)mobility’ in: Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, volume 25, pp 515-536 x Chung C J, Inaba, J, Koolhaas, R, et al (eds), 2002. The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping. Taschen, Cologne. xi Augé, M. 2008. Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity. Verso, London xii Augé pp76 xiii Thrift p67 xiv Thrift p58 xv Thrift p63 xvi Wood, A. 2003. ‘A Rhetoric of Ubiquity: terminal space as omnitopia’ in: Communication Theory, 13(3), pp324-344 xvii Bennett, T. 1995. ‘The Exhibitionary Complex’ in: The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, Routledge, London, pp. 59-79 i