The Secret to Good Airport Design: Aesthetic vs Efficiency | Architectural Digest

most people don't want to spend more time in an airport than they have to that makes efficiency the number one job for airport design but for the time you do spend there you want it to be pleasant comfortable and maybe even beautiful hi I'm Michael whiter I've been an architect for over 35 years and today we're going to be talking about the secret to good airport design and why it's so important to balance the expediency and experience of your time in the airport first of all airports originally were designed primarily just for function they started

as military and government facilities which were just hangers and sheds and dirt Landing strips in a field as flight became more accessible and more people traveled by plane airports needed to be much larger to accommodate the demands for all these new passenger flights they now needed to include spaces for check-in baggage claim gates for waiting at and food service and other retail I mean the idea of a large airport was a totally new typology they could have made them look like train stations but they didn't they were searching for a new language for their design

they maintained some of that utilitarian feel because efficiency and cost were still factors but at this point most of them just ended up looking like Office Buildings at that point efficiency became even more important than before airports needed to accommodate and still do three modes of traffic people bags and flights and the way they did this was to separate the passenger traffic vertically based on whether you were arriving or departing so typically airports are designed on two levels one level is for bags one level is for people airplanes are very tall so typically when you

enter the airport for your departing flight you're entering on the upper level because that's where you enter the plane at and when you arrive at your destination typically you were on the ground level because that is the level in the airplane that the bags are located in and so those bags come in directly and you grab your bag and go out to the street level to get your taxi your Uber or your lift as airports continued to grow they became more complex not only in their configurations but in the variety of spaces that they offered

airport security began to take up a much larger footprint and over the years food service and Retail became a massive part of the floor plan travel efficiency and Retail economics were the main factors in airport design for many years but the aesthetic aspect of their design didn't progress Beyond imitations of Office Buildings until one specific terminal significantly changed the Dynamics of airport design driven more by aesthetic and the experience of visiting the airport itself rather than treating it just as a transitional space between a car and an airplane and the turning point in this aesthetic

Evolution can be traced back to a single terminal that was completed in 1962 at what was then called ISO wild airport and is now called John F Kennedy International this is the tww flight center designed by iros sarin so sarin had just completed the General Motors headquarters in Michigan which had gotten a lot of Acclaim and a lot of attention he designed a lot of very unique buildings all different from one another including the hockey rink at Yale University so sain was chosen for this project because he was known as a Visionary no two buildings

he did were ever the same and he was actually designing another very famous airport called dullas airport outside of Washington at the very same time and for this project he wanted to design a building that evoked the excitement of air travel so what sain did to evoke this idea of flight was he created these swooping Grand curves and lifted them up almost like wings would lift up above this portion of the building and he almost created what appears to be like the beak of a giant bird and to some that was a little too picturesque

and he was actually criticized for it but there's no denying that this building itself the interior as well as the exterior evokes the idea of taking off and flying through the air and what's most remarkable about this is this was done in an era before computers so all this was designed as it were by hand the building has these multiple compound and complex curves and in fact he couldn't even draw it they basically just kept building model after model after model and then they drew that so let's take a look at the interior of the

building which is in many ways is even more exciting than the exterior I mean it's incredible actually he creates these extremely Dynamic swirling forms on the interior and then the roof of this building which comes down and forms the walls and the entire encl closure for the interior is actually made of four separate folded shells and he separated each of these shells with this linear Skylight and for me this sort of represents the Pinnacle of the glamour of air travel in the early 1960s the era of President John F Kennedy the Space Race the Innocence

before Vietnam still basking in the victory of World War II and I think this building by sainin contributed more to that feeling than any other building of the era in that it's the expression of flight and the sense of discovery that comes with air travel so the way sain designed this airport was there's this great terminal but then you've got to go through these long tubes to get to these Gates where the planes are to board your flight you could see the tubes clearly here and through this window here so when you get off your

flight after coming out of this tube of an airplane he brings you into this other tube this really evocative almost like the esophagus of a giant animal that you walk through and then you emerge from this tight dark space into this bright and luminous Airport terminal sinin created this place that you weren't meant just to walk through but you actually meant to linger and enjoy and get a sense of the excitement of air travel typically when you arrive at an airport the last thing you want to do is Linger I mean it's been hours since

you got in the car or the train that brought you to the airport until you waited until you got on your flight until your flight finally landed so the first thing you want to do is get to the baggage carousel as quickly as possible collect your belongings and be on your way you don't linger to look at the architecture but occasionally one is struck by something amazing and that's what happens at tww you come out of your plane into this long tube which brings you into this amazing space below and it gives you a sense

of what a great airport can be suddenly you realize you're in a new and exciting place and that's what a great airport can give some other airports that have also created this feel are baras in Spain by Richard Rogers Kai in Japan by Renzo Piano the Jetta airport in Saudi Arabia byom and dullas Airport of course outside of Washington DC also by sinin the thing about air travel today is it's extremely safe and extremely affordable so because of all this people are spending more and more time at the airport and so one would like them

to be as beautiful as possible so now let's take a look at an airport that takes that idea even further that International Airport in Beijing China so this is the largest airport building in the world designed by zaha Hadid Architects here's everything jumps out of me first off it's the massive scale of this building the building footprint is so large that the runways almost look diminutive in comparison and it obviously takes a lot of cues from what sainin did at tww in terms of its plastic curves and organic shapes it almost looks like some sort

of living Marine creature in fact it's nickname the starfish the other way in that it relates to tww is that it also has these linear skylights these separation of the shells so in a way it's this series of boomerang shapes these parabas that all sort of meet to form this radial construction and in the center there is this lattice work of this amazing Skylight which will'll show you from within and speaking of skylights each one of these little domes are actually skylights and in fact if you look at it from the roadway it looks very

reminiscent of the tww terminal at JFK and you could see with this large overhang and the way the form lifts up and is filled in with glass below is very reminiscent of what snin did at tww but it's not just beautiful on the outside this building is really quite incredible from the interior so these two photos give you a great view of the interior and the skylights that flood it with natural light and I mentioned the vortex at the center of this form that lattice Skylight well this is it from the interior and you could

see the linear skylights that separate each one of those parabolic Boomerang like shapes from one another and this is one of those small almost elliptical shaped skylights that you saw from the roof and it just gives you an idea of the massive scale of this building that that tiny little oval that we saw on the roof is actually compared to a person is an enormous size and you can see the excitement on the interior I mean this actually you know you're at an airport here's the check-in counters here's baggage and then here you see all

these amazing shapes and I love that she did this suspended Arch which looks like it's just floating in midair and then she suspends the bridge from it it's this Dynamic amazing environment that totally envelops you where it's hard to distinguish between floor wall and ceiling one thing grows out of the other so clearly the experience of being here was Forefront in the designer Minds the idea was let's create an amazing place to be okay so let's talk about zaha Hadid truly one of the great architects of the late 20th and early 21st century she was

hugely influenced by a group of artists known as the supremacists who were Kazmir malevich Elis sitki leov papova they were called that because they were interested in the supremacy of pure artistic feeling as opposed to the visual depiction of objects and zaha was also a painter through her paintings she explores spaces that architecture hasn't considered before So these paintings foreshadow her early built work such as the vitra fire station in Switzerland and the Rosenthal Center for contemporary art in Cincinnati which are all very hard-edged and rectilinear and don't employ those soft curves yet at the

Maxi Museum in room she starts to soften her form and creates these more curval linear shapes which over the years leads to the astonishing forms that she employs at ding sadly she died in 2016 before its completion but her stamp is all over it and truly she's one of the great architects of the 21st century but ding is not just beautiful it's also extremely efficient so this aerial view really shows the uh efficiency of this radial Hub and spoke concept of which this airport is designed so basically what this Hub and spoke concept means is

that no gate is too far away from the center in fact it's only an 8 minute walk to the farthest end of each one of these peers so this concept is incredibly pedestrian friendly because it means you don't have to walk all these great distances like you do at other airports for instance at Dallas Fort Worth it's over 2 miles to the furthest gate which is 40 minutes of walking time so this radal concept also means you don't need other forms of transportation to get around the airport you don't require buses shuttles or trains of

course this shape which is so efficient for passengers is actually a somewhat common arrangement for terminals so ding although it's radial is actually based on the peer concept and the peer concept when arranging an airport terminal is basically just a linear Pier like you would find at a marina with boats but in this case it contains planes and the planes just all you know sit here like this so at one end is the terminal and a string of gates come off it along this pier concept and then the jet W goes to each one so

what happens at ding they take this pure concept and they just do five of them coming off the same terminal which again makes this extremely efficient for people inside the airport to get to where they're going of course there are other common configurations and probably the earliest configuration was just the linear concept where you have an airport and here's your terminal and then your gates are here and then you have a plane here and a plane here and a plane here and they're all just arranged in one linear row then of course there's another configuration

which is known as the satellite configuration and the satellite configuration is essentially a total separation from the terminal so you have your terminal here and then you have your Gates out here so the advantage of the satellite configuration is that the tarmac is uninterrupted and the planes are closer to the taxiways and the runways the other advantage of it is it's more efficient and you can get more planes along the perimeter of the building so while it's more efficient for the airplanes it's less efficient for for the passengers and actually the next airport we're going

to look at combines two of these ideas to really maximize the efficiency for the planes this is Hartsfield Jackson International Airport in Atlanta Georgia and it's actually the busiest airport in the world in fact it is the only airport that has ever served over 100 million passengers in one year one of the reasons why this is the busiest airport in the world is that 80% of the US population lives within a 2-hour flight of this airport and if designing an airport is is a series of decisions between Aesthetics and efficiency every decision they made here

at Hartsfield is the complete opposite of what they did at ding at ATL efficiency for flights beats everything else so this is what makes it so efficient for flights they combine two of the configurations that we just looked at you get planes on either side of this linear form and they use them as satellites so that they can get as many as they can and the tarmac is uninterrupted what that means is that any of these planes can reach any of the five runways in a very short amount of time but the trade-off here is

that unlike ding which has a short walk to any gate here the connections between terminals are underground and require passengers to take elevators or escalators down board a train and then take an escalator elevator back up to the level of their flight it's a clever solution separating the traffic vertically to allow maximum flexibility for flights but it also adds multiple modes of travel within the airport itself you take three or four different types of Transportation just to get to your fifth airplane so the sacrifice here is that you're hopefully spending less time in the airport

overall thanks to its efficiency which should mean fewer delays and shorter weights for flights but the time you do spend here is not visually inspiring in the same way that it is at tww or daing so while it is maximizing efficiency for flights there is a trade-off with the experience of actually being in the airport so let's take a closer look at the terminals so this design really hearkens back to the original ideas of airports when they were just these very efficient utilitarian spaces made to get people on and off their airplanes and you could

actually see the planes the jetways and the actual terminal building right here and that terminal building is here in this Photograph and you can see there's really not much to it it's just basically an aluminum box with corrugated metal along the outside the occasional window and that that's it there's very little natural light it couldn't be more mundane if it tried and the Interiors are exactly the same way so what I love about this is the terminal looks like the warehouse buildings that you see surrounding airports in that they're built for completely utilitarian and efficient

reasons and nothing else this airport is built entirely for function and that function is getting airplanes in and getting airplanes out unfortunately one pays an aesthetic price for that efficiency so what is the secret to good airport design I think it's about striking a balance between efficiency and anesthetic experience the reality is the nature of air travel now means that you're going to spend more time in the airport than you really want to so you might as well be in as nice a building as you can be in but no matter how nice that building

is you still want the airport to run efficiently and you don't want to spend more time there than you have to so there has to be a sweet spot between the two and that is the nature of good Airport design today so what's your favorite airport and your least favorite airport let us know in the comments below