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Book
Megastructure Schiphol by Koos Bosma, Marieke Berkers, Iris Burgers, Karel Davids, Abdel El Makhloufi, Heidi de Mare, Anna Nikolaeva and Jan Willem de Wijn Published by nai010, £41 Review by Thomas Wensing
Schiphol Amsterdam Airport is a source of pride to the Netherlands. With 45 million passengers a year, it ranks as the fifth largest airport in Europe and yet is regularly voted as one of the best airports in the world. In the rapidly changing world of global air travel, this consistently high rating and its relative competitiveness is a remarkable achievement, even the more so when considering that the first civil flight went from Schiphol in 1920. The book Megastructure Schiphol — Design in Spectacular Simplicity charts the design development of the airport, and reveals how Schiphol is both international in its orientation and as a result of the landscape and public-infrastructure planning tradition of the Netherlands. The various aspects of Schiphol’s design, such as its growth over time, spatial impact and day-to-day operations, are effectively communicated through so-called visual essays, data visualisations, while the essays give more detailed historical, political and economic background information. The attractive graphics and layout of the book reveal the intricacies of the airport in great clarity; they convey that an airport is a three-dimensional infrastructural and logistical puzzle of astounding complexity. The large body of visual information is organised in chapters dedicated to the different scale levels; at 1:10,000 scale Schiphol is presented as a megastructure, at
1:1,000 scale it figures as a node of air, rail and highway infrastructure, while at 1:100 and smaller, the architecture, interior and wayfinding is highlighted. The clarity of the book’s graphic design and typography deserves special mention; it took its inspiration from the pictograms and signage of Schiphol and the result is a combination of visual legibility and wit for which Dutch design has become widely recognised. The airport in its current location, officially opened in April 1967, was designed by a team prosaically named Schiphol Terminal Construction Office. Due to the demands of the design operation and programme it was decided to bring together an architect and two engineering firms. The architect Marius Duintjer, a functionalist, had the great foresight to bring the interior architect Kho Liang Ie onboard. The design sensibility of the two was closely
The clarity of the book’s graphic design deserves special mention; it took its inspiration from the signage of Schiphol aligned and complementary. Whereas Duintjer was interested in unravelling the logistics of traffic, goods and passengers, it was Kho Liang Ie who introduced the design concept of ‘spectacular simplicity’, in which all scale levels are jointly considered in an air hub which is both efficient and serene. The black and white photographs of the Seventies show a light-filled and rigorous modular architecture that aimed to emphasise the efficiency and glamour of air travel. The latest pictures of Schiphol, by contrast, are testament to the explosive growth in passenger numbers, fuelled by the package holiday, low-cost airlines and unbridled consumption. The single terminal concept, taken from Chicago O’Hare airport, has proved to be an efficient blueprint for Schiphol’s uninterrupted growth, and continues to allow for relatively short distances between gates and brief transfers between flights. With the completion of a fifth runway, and talk of construction of a sixth, this concept appears to have reached its natural limits though, since there is no way to connect new runways satisfactorily to the single terminal without a shuttle or buses. The current architects, Benthem Crouwel Architects, (involved since 1982) and interior architect Nel Verschuuren, (of Kho Liang Ie Associates), continue to follow the same design ethos of simplicity and efficiency, but they are increasingly accused of standing in the way of the commercial exploitation of the
terminal and its environs. It is to their great credit that they have managed these forces effectively while maintaining a consistently high design standard. Megastructure Schiphol does not stop short at discussing the design aspects of Schiphol however. There were three essays that I found particularly topical when it comes to explaining the inner workings of Schiphol as a corporate machine: Air Money and Space, by El Makhloufi and Davids; Two Generations of Functionalist Design for a Threshold World, by Berkers and Burgers, and Farewell to Spectacular Simplicity, by Bosma and Nikolaeva. Schiphol is a company with a 76 % majority share held by the Dutch government, but this means that it can act as a private entity with little direct democratic accountability. In recent years it has become a major property owner and forceful regional actor. It has the economic power to compete with provinces and the municipalities of Amsterdam and Rotterdam. The perverse nature of the relationship between national government and Schiphol becomes evident when you consider the track record of continually breaking the legal limits of noise and air pollution. These limits are, after all, set by the government itself. This makes clear that economic growth in the Dutch planning model has the upper hand, but I do hope that these essays are the beginning of a serious change to the skewed balance between the economy, quality of living and the environment. 1 – Schipol Airport, now with five runways and talk of a sixth, has reached its natural limits with no way to connect the new runways to the single terminal
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