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Description: Jet Age Aesthetic: The Glamour of Media in Motion
~The most enduring symbols of the jet age are the many new and...
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.19-55
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00209.002
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Chapter 1. Fluid Motion on the Ground: Designing the Airport for the Jet Age
The most enduring symbols of the jet age are the many new and redesigned airports built to welcome jet service, and perhaps none is as iconic as the TWA terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York (fig. 1.1). The building, designed by Eero Saarinen, is no longer in use as a terminal but is so valued for its futuristic vision of airport life that no one can bear to part with it. It fronts the extremely hip Jet Blue Terminal behind it today, having been transformed into a hotel.1Ben Mutzabaugh, “Exclusive First Look: Inching Closer to Launch, TWA Hotel Unveils Room Design,” USA Today, April 16, 2018. Such terminals symbolize the jet age, which put a global transport system into place and became idealized as sites where individuals could prepare to inhabit a future whose time had come. For the government authorities charged with designing and building them, airports were enormous public works projects, claiming vast material and symbolic capital. They can, in that way, be contextualized in a much longer history of projects in which governments and citizens alike in the western world have staked their power and prestige on their relative technological “modernity.” One need think only about the fountains of Versailles to understand the power of state-sponsored technological spectacle in places such as France. For European nations especially, the imperialism of the nineteenth century offered an extensive laboratory for technological experimentation in transport, including track-laying, canal-building, and even spectacular car-racing that tested the limits of both speed and dependability.2Chandra Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Chandra Mukerji, Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); and Daniel Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). Bringing the United States into the narrative is Michael Adas, Dominance by Design (Cambridge: Belknap, Harvard University Press, 2009). The history of the jet age airport fits into this longer-term history and in fact extends the link between colonial development and transport: western powers built runways and eventually airports in the physical places they dominated and thus continued to exert and extend their spheres of influence, even into the period of decolonization.3Pan Am built its airline by flying to Cuba. While European powers initially used air power for mail and for shuttling diplomats, by the mid-1930s British Imperial Airways had over fifty-nine thousand miles of interconnecting airways and five hundred stops around the world. See Alistair Gordon, Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Revolutionary Structure (New York: Metropolitan, 2004), 76.
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Description: TWA Terminal by Saarinen, Eero
Fig. 1.1 Eero Saarinen, TWA Terminal, John F. Kennedy (originally Idlewild) Airport, New York, 1962. Photograph by Ezra Stoller. © Ezra Stoller/Esto
While providing the infrastructure that made the genuinely global expansion of travel by air possible, airports also were spaces for extending the experience of flight. The jet’s special quality, aside from its unprecedented speed, was a ride that seemed to defy the ordinary experience of moving through crowded spaces on the ground. The sense of going nowhere fast provoked and challenged planners and architects who sought not merely to “symbolize” the experience of the jet in the new airports but also to design new kinds of spaces that would make the airport more like the experience of riding in a jet plane.4An additional way to consider airport “symbolics” is to study airport art programs. See Alex J. Taylor, “Flying Machines: Calder and the Sensation of the Jet Age” (unpublished manuscript). Gordon’s Naked Airport offers a history of airport design and is a general cultural history of the airport. Gordon argues, however, that the airport supplied a “sense of movement, transition, and excitement that flight itself no longer provided” (177). The airport also took the lion’s share of attention because the jet plane’s design became homogenous across the world and only interiors varied.
Although architectural historians have studied airports as distinctly twentieth-century features of the built environment, they have, for the most part, anachronistically concentrated on the terminal buildings. They have also considered them in the broader context of the work of such celebrated architects as Saarinen, Paul Andreu, and Norman Foster, who, in their careers, did much more than design airports. Although it may be tempting to study airports as though they are the cathedrals of the mid-twentieth century, they are not equivalent. Fixating on terminal buildings as if they were monumental gateways distorts a history that was neither imagined nor experienced that way by planners or passengers. From a transport history perspective, it may well be that the airport is to the mid-twentieth century what the train station had been to the nineteenth century and the port had been before that.5Thomas S. Hines, Architecture of the Sun: Los Angeles Modernism, 1900–1970 (New York: Rizzoli, 2010); Deyan Sudjic, Norman Foster: A Life in Architecture (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2010); Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen and Donald Albrecht, Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Brian Edwards, The Modern Airport Terminal: New Approaches to Airport Architecture (London: Taylor and Francis, 2005). Sammy Goldenberg wrote an undergraduate honors thesis in the History Department at USC, “Rejecting Futurama: Los Angeles International Airport and the American Turn Against Growth” (2010). See also Vanessa R. Schwartz, “LAX: Designing for the Jet Age,” in Overdrive: Architecture in Los Angeles, ed. Wim DeWit and Christopher Alexander (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2013), 163–83. But as Time magazine explained in 1960, “Many of the new airports boast functional rather than beautiful buildings.”6“Airport Cities: Gateways to the Jet Age,” Time, August 15, 1960, 68. Architects, planners, and passengers had much more on their minds than the airport’s terminals. Driven by predictions of rapidly expanded travel, airport planners built with the idea that no airport could ever be fixed enough to serve as a monumental gateway because airports must meet the challenge of constant expansion and change. If jet age airports monumentalize anything, it is the period’s embrace of rapid growth and change, the new consumer-oriented focus on design (passengers and their movement), and a dedication to the idea that enormous building projects could be bound for obsolescence—all undertaken in order to keep people moving.
At the inauguration of the newly renovated terminal at 11 A.M. on February 24, 1961, the president of France, Charles de Gaulle, explained with pride to an audience of fifteen hundred people that the airport at Orly would stand as proof that France would play an important role in the present and future of global politics. He insisted that “in inaugurating this impressive work, we prove that we are not only capable of living our century but even more that in a certain way we are shaping and leading it.” That evening five thousand invited guests toured the new terminal and danced the night away, knowing that, as the president had earlier said, “our country is made aware that all its limits have been pushed back.”7“Allocution Inaugurale de Charles de Gaulle,” February 24, 1961. Box 37, doc. 19993055, ADP. Also published in Charles de Gaulle, Discours et messages: Avec le renouveau, 1958–1962 (Paris: Plon, 1979), 283–84. Given the nation’s extensive recent material and psychological war damage, the shiny new airport became a part of national recovery and a means to jockey for a leading status among nations. While such airport tales offer important insight into specific municipal and national histories, jet age airports also shared many broader qualities.
To address the expansion in air travel, airports responded to local demands with a variety of architectural and design solutions. George Nelson, however, reflecting on changes in travel-related architecture between 1947 and 1967, saw the value of uniformity. “The last thing the international airlines need is picturesque variations in terminal design. To run an airline with any possibility of reliable schedules and safety, every operational feature . . . has to be identical everywhere. . . . The universal architectural response to mass travel is mass modern.”8George Nelson, “Architecture for the New Itinerants,” Saturday Review, April 22, 1967, 30–31. Of course, airports did vary, and Nelson went on in the very same article to assess Saarinen’s TWA terminal, which seemed to him less flexible than Orly, whose endless façade was built with expansion in mind. Nevertheless, if an airport offered mass modern as a style, its aesthetic also massively emphasized motion.
Although they were enormous infrastructural undertakings, the many airports built and rebuilt to accommodate the jet display a new architectural logic in which the technological and consumerist cultures of obsolescence and expendability extended to the built environment. Once introduced into regular commercial use, the Boeing 707 ensured that jet travel could more or less safely become a major mode of passenger transportation. To bring the experience of air travel to life on the ground, planners focused on fluid motion, transforming architecture in favor of the user and envisioning their own engagement in large projects of people-moving and planning as being as significant as their former charge to make monumental gateways.
The introduction of civil jet service inaugurated a period of global airport renovation, expansion, and construction. Between 1958 and 1962, new airports or redesigned and expanded ones opened in many places, including London (Gatwick), Algiers, Vienna, Copenhagen, Nice, New York (Idlewild), Brussels, Bordeaux, Marseilles, Montreal, Rome, and Los Angeles. Although it would not be until the end of the 1960s that frequent air travel in Europe and the United States extended to masses of travelers, the fact that the sparkling new Kingston airport in Jamaica is featured as a mark of James Bond’s cosmopolitan life in Dr. No, the first of the Bond films (1961; released in 1962), suggests the extent to which people expected jets to knit the world together. The airport depicted in the film—a gleaming open rectangular passthrough—could have been anywhere until the moment Bond steps into the specificity of Jamaica’s tropical climate. In other words, airports would be the herald of a truly global network that would transport not just occidentals but also people from such former British colonies as Jamaica. This network would bring the otherwise developing world into the metropole and well outside it, creating a new geography beyond core and periphery that the colonial era had established.9See Vanessa R. Schwartz, It’s So French! Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 192–98, and Mark Dierikx, Clipping the Clouds: How Air Travel Changed the World (Westport: Praeger, 2008), 71.
Because the jet was certain to maintain its identity as the fastest form of travel for the foreseeable future, it also retained its cutting-edge status for a long time, even as it was in a constant state of flux owing to airport expansion during the period. Critics worried that builders could not keep pace with the changes jets would bring. “These bright new jets w[ould] operate in obsolete terminals,” fretted one writer on the inauguration of Pan Am’s Jet Clipper America service in 1958.10Richard Witkin, “U.S. Jet Starting Daily Ocean Runs,” New York Times, October 26, 1958. This comment was meant to urge rapid expansion of airports everywhere, but it also reflected the broader ethos of planning for change and growth that shaped the quality and character of jet age airport design. As M. Blackburn, the TWA pilot who flew the first New York–Paris flight in a Constellation in 1945 observed, “For fifteen years I have been through all of the world’s airports; I have never seen a finished terminal.”11Robert Buron, Ministère des Travaux Publics and Transports, Inauguration of Orly, February 24, 1961, Orly Inauguration, ADP. Not only did the growth of air travel in the fifteen years since the end of World War II outstrip anything with which airports could keep pace, but the pilot’s bemused tone also reveals what would become the accepted view of airport building: airports required expansion planning even as they were being built. The experience of walking through constantly changing terminals became an important way for passengers to experience the sense that the future had indeed arrived.
At the same time, from a functional point of view, the jet itself actually demanded relatively minor changes at airports. Because jets went faster and carried heavier loads, airports needed longer runways made to bear the greater weight and safely land the planes. The larger wingspan and length of the planes necessitated greater space at the plane’s parking gates. Yet airport redesign went far beyond such basic renovations. Because the planes could also accommodate many more riders, jet age airport planners focused on the passengers rather than on the operational needs of the flying equipment. For the first time, the airport was about the people flying rather than the machines flying, which was also in keeping with the period’s general orientation toward consumers, especially in design.12Andrew M. Shanken, 194X: Architecture, Planning, and Consumer Culture on the American Home Front (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Amy F. Ogata, Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America (Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2013). Airport designers focused on saving passengers from long walks and protecting them from the weather, the jet fumes, and the physical realities and challenges of moving human beings through space. Again, the goal was to replicate the sensationless fluid motion and comfort of riding in a jet.
Jet age airports, as contemporary critic Reyner Banham noted, were designed for “obsolescence.”13Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning From Las Vegas (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972); Larry Busbea, Topologies: The Urban Utopia in France, 1960–1970 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007); Reyner Banham, “The Obsolescent Airport,” Architectural Review 132, no. 790 (October 1962): 252–53. When Charles and Ray Eames made a film as part of the planning of Dulles Airport, sited outside the capital of the United States in Chantilly, Virginia, and the first brand-new airport built from scratch to service the new jet planes, its title, The Expanding Airport, described a condition that assumed built-in obsolescence. Although some airport designs offered solutions that turned out to be better adapted to continual change than Dulles, the constant growth of air travel foreseen in such projects motivated planners to embrace the ideal of constant motion on the ground as part of the project of building in a state of flux.
In the wake of the inauguration of the new terminals, Banham’s 1962 essay “The Obsolescent Airport” summarized the state of things. Banham observed that airports were like “demented amoebas” that had turned inside out to the point of the “disintegration of buildings.” The initial yacht basin–like structure of the airport, with its compact cluster of buildings, had given way, he noted, to hidden tunnels, far-off gateways, and terminals that he described as mere passthroughs. During the first era of airport construction, in the 1930s, designs had developed away from the primitive landing fields to follow the general logic of other main transport facilities, in particular that of the maritime culture after which it had been modeled.
The jet age airport would differ. In the new airports Banham saw the logic of the techno-pop culture he sought to explain more generally as part of his critical design theory: “Like all monuments in a technological culture, they were by definition dead, superseded before they were designed.”14Banham, “Obsolescent Airport,” 252. Like the other members of the Independent Group in England such as Lawrence Alloway, Banham identified the reorientation of values in art and design to consumer taste. Airport planners, who hardly had the same cultural taste as these young critics, nevertheless shared the view that obsolescence and expendability should drive decision-making.15For excellent work on the Independent Group, see Anne Massey, The Independent Group: Modernism and Mass Culture in Britain, 1945–59 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); Lucy Bradnock, Courtney J. Martin, and Rebecca Peabody, eds., Lawrence Alloway: Critic and Curator (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2015); and Daniel Horowitz, Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). They aimed to make structures that could “disintegrate.” Building for obsolescence attests both to the culture of rapid change associated with the speed of the jet and also to the notion that the feeling of speed needed to be lived on the ground. Airports changed in order to reinforce the promise that flyers would take the jet’s airborne, fluid motion back to terra firma.
Deadening passenger sensation in favor of circulation became the raison d’être of the jet age airport, an extension of the plane ride. One British architect noted: “To us, the passenger is a package on legs—or more accurately a weak swimmer in the strong current of a Circulation Diagram—accepted, inhaled, sucked into a backwater, ejected, swept on . . . and finally disgorged into some kind of streamlined transport, of which all kinds look increasingly alike. For this is a second curiosity—the effect of contemporary styling as sedative, bromide, antidote to feeling. . . . You deaden travel (which is drama) by . . . not allowing the passenger the actual moment of crossing the windy tarmac or the steep gangway.”16Lionel Brett, “Arrival and Departure,” Architectural Review 118, no. 703 (July 1955): 7–8.
The jet nonexperience began with the passenger’s journey to the airport. Jacques Block, director of planning and development at the Aéroports de Paris (ADP) during the 1960s, emphasized the idea that jets inaugurated an era of fluid and speedy mobility in the context of a vast transport network. He argued that airports needed to be sited near city centers because of the increase in the relative cultural and symbolic value of speed that jets would extend to all sorts of travel: “Because of the rapidity of air travel, passengers find delays in getting from town to the airport increasingly intolerable.”17Jacques Block, “Planning Airports System in Paris Area,” Transportation Engineering Journal (May 1969): 253. 016 A.69.3.6, ADP. Thus, planners focused on efficient means of airport arrival, ranging from such realized plans as Gatwick’s train station, which offered the first direct rail service to an airport, to the redirected highway underneath Orly airport (fig. 1.2), to Los Angeles International’s unrealized plan for regular helicopter service. As new airports developed, they took up more space and were increasingly far from the cities they served, epitomized by Dulles, situated twenty-six miles from the capital, and O’Hare, eighteen miles from downtown Chicago.
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Description: Orly Airport by Unknown
Fig. 1.2 Orly Airport, circa 1962. Aéroports de Paris
Continuity of travel happened between modes of transport as well as within the airport itself. Banham observed that the new airports were unlike the train stations of the nineteenth century: “The emphasis lies increasingly on the continuity of the process of transport, rather than the monumental halting places along the way.”18Banham, “Obsolescent Airport,” 253. Desire for continuity of the journey also shaped transit strategy within airports, where everything from moving sidewalks to monorails to LAX’s unrealized coin-operated aerial tramway, known as the Skylift, preoccupied jet age planners (fig. 1.3).19Lockheed Aircraft Service, Proposal for Los Angeles International Airport Intra-Terminal Transportation System, 1960, 11. Flight Path Learning Center, LAX. A 1967 report on a planned expansion of Los Angeles International Airport, its first since the initial one in 1961, summarized what an airport should be: “The airport . . . is dedicated to moving people in an orderly manner in the shortest time possible.”20William Pereira, Journey to the Airport (Pereira Associates, 1967), 13. Box 107, William Pereira Archives, USC Special Collections. Moving people, not airplanes, defined the mission of the planners.
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Description: Lockheed Aircraft Service, Proposal for Los Angeles International Airport...
Fig. 1.3 Lockheed Aircraft Service, Proposal for Los Angeles International Airport Intra-Terminal Transportation System, 1960
Infrastructural organization assured continuity of movement as much as any architectural element did. For example, as an American Airlines brochure explained, “At your destination terminal, you’ll find the advantages of jet travel extend to ground service as well: thanks to American’s Jet Flagships’ new Baggage Expediter system, you’ll be able to claim your bags and be on your way sooner than before.”21American Airlines brochure, “Welcome Aboard Your American Flagship” (1959), 13. San Francisco International Airport Archives. At Orly, planners envisioned the trip to the airport as a seamless journey from home to the airport by car, even though most Parisians did not even own cars. The airport planners created four thousand parking spaces, more than any other airport had at that time. Regardless of how passengers actually arrived, once inside the terminal they were treated to the new and efficient process that became known internationally as the “Orly-system” of handling bags and customs. Previously, passengers with Paris departures had arrived at the airport through a series of stops and starts. They were gathered at Les Invalides Terminal in town and handled as a group by flight, herded by a hostess. They presented their bags at the in-town terminal and then passed through customs and boarded a bus to the airport. The new system was, on the other hand, one-stop, awarding passengers new-found independence until the moment of boarding. Planners envisioned that passengers would now be able to move at a better pace, that the process would be faster and more convenient. Upon arriving at Orly, travelers individually presented their bags at check-in and passed through customs and passport control, a system that became the model at most airports worldwide.
Planners welcomed the speed and speed-up of travel by air as a challenge on the ground and were concerned with the passenger’s experience. The speed of jet travel exacerbated the perception of the slowness of terrestrial travel in the minds of passengers. As Eero Saarinen explained at an airline presentation regarding his commission for Dulles, “It is also felt that with high-speed jet planes, the sense of ‘standing around’ and the slow processes on the ground will, psychologically, produce even more aggravation and annoyance than now.”22“The Expanding Airport” (1958). Eames Papers, Box 201, Folder 16, Library of Congress. An unpredictable but sometimes unavoidable slow-down of this class of people who embraced mobility collided with what became an expectation of smooth and undisturbed travel. Speed was as much imagined as it was real, in other words. As one passenger explained, “From the moment when we realized we could go fast, we wanted it to go faster.” Another dreamed that the airport soon would be “just a passthrough where we would never wait because the airplanes would be constantly taking off. We’d walk three seconds and suddenly be in the plane.”23François Lugassy, “Les attitudes vis-à-vis du voyage aérien et de l’aéroport,” Phase B (September–May 1966): 89, 126. Employees were quick to note that passengers expressed frustration when planes were more frequently delayed than were trains, and they reported that travelers were especially vexed when nature and weather conditions wreaked havoc on their travel schedule. Despite these rising expectations and growing frustrations, Orly airport employees interviewed in 1965 suggested that airports were on the whole successful in achieving the effect of sensationless flow for their passengers. One interviewee described the airport as a place where passengers were put into pneumatic tubes at one end and spit out at their destination. The speed of travel even provoked observations that the idea of taking a trip or journey—un voyage—was being replaced by the notion of pure transit; one observer called this experience déplacement, which emphasizes movement itself as the key element in such travel.24Lugassy, “Les attitudes,” 8, 11–18, and “Voyageur aérien, vu par le personnel travaillant en aéroport” (December 1965): 53. ADP.
The most influential airport designer of the period immediately following the jet age, Paul Andreu, once said, “Any airport must be as much an interchange as a building.” Andreu delighted when people likened his best-known airport, the circular Roissy–Charles de Gaulle, to a parking garage (fig. 1.4). He even quipped that no photos could represent his project because they could not “capture the image of movement, [as] they were indifferent to this temporal dimension.”25Interview with Paul Andreu, “La ville aéroport,” in La vitesse (Paris: Cartier/Flammarion, 1991), 116. His building projects are associated with what became the next wave of airport design in the jumbo-jet era of the 1970s, but Andreu insisted that planners already had established the values and vision of travel by jet that remained unchanged until security concerns arose with the hijackings of the 1970s. Andreu pointed especially to Eero Saarinen as his inspiration, and it was Saarinen, in the prime of his short but important and busy airport-building career, who stated, “An airport should be essentially non-static.”26Allan Temko, “An Interview with Eero Saarinen,” Horizons 2, no. 6 (July 1960): 123.
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Description: Terminal 1, Roissy-en-France by Andreu, Paul
Fig. 1.4 Paul Andreu, Terminal 1, Roissy-en-France, 1970. Aéroports de Paris
If we have the jet age to thank for establishing the blueprint for all airports since, Saarinen’s projects have come to represent the glamour and innovation of this first wave of jet age airport designs.27Pelkonen and Albrecht, Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future, esp. Susanna Santala, “Airports: Building for the Jet Age,” 300–307; see also Alice T. Friedman, American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). Saarinen did not live to see any of his airport projects completed, although Kennedy airport’s TWA Terminal (fig. 1.5) and Dulles Airport were being built when he died in September 1961 from complications following surgery for a brain tumor discovered the month before. His third project, the foreign carrier terminal at Athens Airport, was barely even designed by 1961; Kevin Roche completed it in 1969. The circular shape of the first two projects, as well as Saarinen’s creative use of concrete, helped to define a modernist architecture that has fallen in and out of critical regard several times since. Saarinen’s reputation for having been complicit in fulfilling the vision of corporate clients had also been part of his critics’ disdain for his work.
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Description: TWA Terminal by Saarinen, Eero
Fig. 1.5 Eero Saarinen, TWA Terminal, John F. Kennedy (originally Idlewild) Airport, New York, 1956–62. Photograph by Balthazar Korab
Despite the attention paid to his terminal buildings then and now, Saarinen saw in airport building something else entirely. In the midst of the Dulles project he wrote to Charles and Ray Eames, “We have not thought about what the building will look like, what the design will be. . . . Those are later functions that result out of what works the best. What works the best is partly what works best for the airlines, but it’s also for what works the best for the passengers.”28“Expanding Airport.” In other words, the building was literally the last thing on Saarinen’s mind. Although no one had charged him with doing anything other than the “pure” architecture for the project, as he put it, Saarinen boasted that, along with the engineers and the economic consultant, “we created an entirely new system of passenger handling.”29Temko, “Interview with Eero Saarinen,” 123. Saarinen formulated his passenger orientation by thinking of the entire trip and its continuity rather than simply designing a monumental gateway or thinking about where to land and park an airplane. Instead, Saarinen attempted to construct airports around a naturalized idea of how humans moved through space in order to keep them moving in ways he considered “unremarkable”—ways that would keep them moving like a jet. This is consonant with the era’s larger inauguration of ergonomic culture. As Henry Dreyfuss, author of the key text Designing for People (1955), put it, “When the point of contact between the product and the people becomes a point of friction, then the industrial designer has failed.”30John Harwood, The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945–1976 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 96. Harwood’s reading of ergonomics is as a post-humanist construction, which is interesting, but I question whether designers and architects such as Saarinen really imagined it that way. For Saarinen and others who set about to design jet age airports, flow rather than friction became the goal.
Saarinen developed his ideas about the needs of passengers while designing the TWA Terminal and conceiving the entire airport project at Dulles. He first followed directions from the airlines, but he also conducted meticulous airport passenger usage studies in both places. During the design phase, he and his firm directly observed and measured how people moved through space rather than simply considering the needs of the airplanes. According to Roche, who worked with Saarinen at the time and later took over much of his architectural practice, “We would travel to airports and time planes taking on passengers . . . the time it took to go from sidewalk to ticketing, checking in your baggage, stopwatch timing all those things.”31Antonio Roman, Eero Saarinen: An Architecture of Simplicity (New York: Princeton Architectural, 2003), 43, 60.
The TWA Terminal became the iconic airport image due to the distinctive soaring look of the concrete, which people associated with flight or with a bird. Saarinen, however, denied this had been his intention: “The fact that to some people it looked like a bird in flight was really coincidental.” The terminal was also made famous by the beautiful photographs by Ezra Stoller that the architect’s wife, Aline Saarinen, commissioned when the job was completed (see figs. 1.1, 1.7).32Aline Saarinen, ed., Eero Saarinen on His Work (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 60; see also Nathalie Roseau, “The Obsolescence of the Monument, the Future of the Airport Icon,” in The Challenge of Change: Dealing with the Legacy of the Modern Movement, ed. D. Van den Heuvel, M. Mesman, W. Quist, and B. Lemmens (Amsterdam: IOS, 2008), 87–92. The building also no doubt successfully functioned as a branded object for TWA, and thus the external shell, where the logo appeared, has drawn great attention. Yet in its design and form it also suggests a great deal of visual continuity with Disneyland’s TWA Rocket to the Moon ride, which opened in 1955, the year Saarinen received the terminal commission (fig. 1.6).33This connection appears important to me even though Kevin Roche implies that it isn’t possible. He said in an August 2, 2007, interview with Kornel Ringli, “As far as the concept of the building is concerned, TWA as a company has no input at all.” Ringli, Designing TWA: Eero Saarinen’s Airport Terminal in New York (Zurich: Park, 2015), 155. While the TWA Terminal may have been a classic “signature building,” when recontextualized among the variety of simultaneous jet age airports, we can see that its interior, as well as the fantasy of fluid motion around which it staged the passengers’ movements, was part of a larger vision of new airports. Inside the TWA Terminal passengers were to be handled with optimized precision on the model of the “smoothly functioning machine.”34Ringli, Designing TWA, 58, 126. To Saarinen, getting through the building mattered more than what it looked like, inside and out. What he cherished, rather than the soaring concrete, were the tunnels and tubes, which made up the in-between spaces called jetways, and the automated luggage systems that moved passengers smoothly through space (fig. 1.7).
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Description: TWA Rocket to the Moon by Unknown
Fig. 1.6 TWA Rocket to the Moon, Tomorrowland, Disneyland, circa 1955–59. © Disney
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Description: TWA Terminal Tunnel by Saarinen, Eero
Fig. 1.7 TWA Terminal Tunnel, 1962. Photograph by Ezra Stoller. © Ezra Stoller/Esto
In the excitement generated by the TWA Terminal under construction, Saarinen next received a Federal Aviation Administration commission to design Dulles Airport. Guided, he said, by the following questions: “How should an airport terminal function? What is the best method? What really happens in a terminal?” Saarinen imagined what was then known as Washington International Airport as “the best thing I have done.” Not long after his death, his widow, Aline, confirmed that “my husband and his associates thought the latter [Washington International Airport] will probably be his masterwork.”35Dedication Program, Dulles International Airport, November 17–18, 1962. Eero Saarinen Papers, Group 593, Box 54, Series III, Folder 101, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University. Letter from Aline Saarinen to Sigrid Asmus, December 21, 1961. Eero Saarinen Papers, Group 595, Box 462, Series IV, Folder 1305, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University.
Saarinen’s satisfaction with the project taking shape derived not from the spectacular terminal building that continues to stand for critics as the best interpretation of the airport terminal as “something between earth and sky” (fig. 1.8).36Saarinen as cited in Allan Temko, Eero Saarinen (New York: G. Braziller, 1962), 115. Rather, it was from the greenlighting of what he considered the most important of the project’s innovations: the much-debated mobile lounge, which the New York Times noted was the “heart of the Dulles idea,” as well as a “lumbering, awkward-looking land ferry” (fig. 1.9).37Joseph A. Loftus, “At Dulles Airport, Traffic Is Light Year After Opening—Buses into Washington a Problem,” New York Times, November 17, 1963. The lounge would serve as the ultimate both in people-moving devices and as part of the logic of expanding airports. It detached from the main terminal and took passengers directly to the airplane, which could thus be located as far out in the field as needed (fig. 1.10). In a brochure the FAA touted the new airport’s use of the lounge: “The passenger has had the same priority as the airplane in the planning for the new airfield.”38“Dulles International Airport,” FAA Brochure (circa 1962). Flight Path Learning Center, LAX. The FAA promoted the mobile lounge as a “dramatic solution to a jet age problem.”39“Mobile Lounge, Dulles Airport,” FAA Brochure (circa 1961). Eero Saarinen Papers, Group 593, Box 54, Series III, Folder 101, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University. Although it might have been compared to the buses then in use in Europe to take passengers from the ticket counter to the plane, Saarinen, who thought a bus was a technological step down from the plane, instead asked, “How can one make something that is luxurious? Then it struck us: by combining the departure lounge and the moving vehicle into a single convenience, and by combining that with a covered gangplank which hitches directly to the plane.”40Allan Temko, “An Interview with Eero Saarinen” Horizons 2, no. 6 (July 1960): 123.
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Description: Dulles International Airport by Saarinen, Eero
Fig. 1.8 Eero Saarinen, Dulles International Airport, Chantilly, Virginia, 1961–63. Photograph by Balthazar Korab
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Description: Dulles Mobile Lounge, model by Saarinen, Eero
Fig. 1.9 Eero Saarinen, Dulles Mobile Lounge, model, 1958. Robert C. Lautman Photo. Yale University, Eero Saarinen Papers
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Description: Dulles Airport, Federal Aviation Administration brochure by Unknown
Fig. 1.10 Dulles Airport, Federal Aviation Administration brochure, 1961. Yale University, Eero Saarinen Papers
The lounge made a complete separation between the terminal buildings and the airplane possible. Passengers would board planes directly from the mobile lounge, a vehicle fifteen feet wide by sixty feet long that detached from the terminal and attached to the plane, and could remain in the field or at a servicing station, thus bypassing the need for what most planners, critics, and passengers considered the plague of expanding airports: the lengthy walks, often of more than a mile, from the main buildings to the gates. Saarinen’s proud devotion to this project resided in assuring passenger flow rather than in building the monumental architecture for which most people know Dulles today.
Due to the cost and suspicion over the unusual concept, along with the logistical challenges it would entail, it took a great investment of time and energy to get the airlines to agree to the mobile lounge, even though Saarinen was adapting an FAA report originally commissioned in 1953.41Report, E. W. Fuller, “A Proposed Mobile Gate House,” September 26, 1952. Eames Papers, Box 201, Folder 14, Library of Congress. So committed was Saarinen to this idea that he made an animated film to pitch the project. Finding his film ultimately inadequate, he also proposed to his partners in the project, Burns and McDonnell Engineering and Amman and Whitney, that he commission his good friends Charles and Ray Eames to make a different film to pitch the advantages of the mobile lounge, a film like the one the pair had made for IBM.42Letter from Eero Saarinen to Robert McDonnell, July 25, 1958. Eero Saarinen Papers, Group 593, Box 462, Series Iv, Folder 1304, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University. See also Alexandra Lange, “This Year’s Model: Representing Modernism to the Post-War American Corporation,” Journal of Design History 19, no. 3 (Autumn 2006): 233–48. The idea has been credited to Saarinen, which is not quite right, since it also adapted the common practice already used in smaller European airports and an earlier proposed by an FAA report. As Charles Eames explained, “Eero was having really a tough time with the official groups involved. . . . And he said, ‘. . . it takes three hours (to explain the lounge concept as the heart of the airport plan). And they just can’t sit still for it . . . if we had a film that could state the concept of Dulles Airport . . . if we could state it in fifteen minutes, God, it would be great.’”43“The Eames Design,” Public Broadcast Laboratory, interview with Edward P. Morgan, April 6, 1969, in Daniel Ostroff, ed., An Eames Anthology: Articles, Film Scripts, Interviews, Letters, Notes, Speeches (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 269.
Charles Eames claims that they spent a day with Saarinen in July 1958 to consider the project, although that seems unlikely, given that on July 7 Saarinen and Roche sent more than two-hundred-fifty pages of research to the Eames Office in California, including the script and slides of a presentation Saarinen had delivered to the airlines on July 1, which contained his unsuccessful pitch for the mobile lounge. Additional materials included a copy of the 1953 FAA report “Proposed Mobile Gate House,” which had inspired Saarinen, and materials that appear to be passenger studies such as the ones that Roche said they used for the design of the TWA Terminal and that were, according to Aline Saarinen, the result of a “conscientious and intensive research program . . . undertaken by the whole staff. . . . The possibility of the mobile lounge and the research into its workability, etc. occupied an intensive three months—and was a seriously studied thing.”44Letter from Aline Saarinen to Judy and Walter McQuade of Fortune magazine, January 8, 1962. Eero Saarinen Papers, Group 593, Box 463, Series IV, Folder 1310, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University. The materials charted airport research on the number of passenger steps, length of trips (timed by stopwatch) from passengers’ arrival at the terminal to enplaning, as well as descriptions of the new problem of jet blast, which made it desirable to keep passengers and planes apart.45The Expanding Airport: A Study of Service and Convenience for Washington International, directed by Charles and Ray Eames, 1958.
The film made by the Eameses, The Expanding Airport: A Study of Service and Convenience for Washington International, visualized the vast amount of data Saarinen provided and condensed it into an appealing form that was only nine minutes long. It used the familiar very flat and economical mid-century style of animated drawings penned by artist Glen Fleck, which were combined with photographs.46Amid Amidi, Cartoon Modern: Style and Design in 1950s Animation (San Francisco: Chronicle, 2006). The film’s narrative begins with a new-fangled jet plane emerging from behind the clouds, and then we enter a schematically drawn jet interior where a lounging male passenger is attended to by a stewardess (fig. 1.11). The comfort of life in the air is immediately and comically contrasted to the problems on the ground, where the flight attendant is forced to carry her passenger in order to continue the luxurious service and comfort offered in flight (fig. 1.12).
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Description: Still from The Expanding Airport: A Study of Service and Convenience for Washington...
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Description: Still from The Expanding Airport: A Study of Service and Convenience for Washington...
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Description: Still from The Expanding Airport: A Study of Service and Convenience for Washington...
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Description: Still from The Expanding Airport: A Study of Service and Convenience for Washington...
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Description: Still from The Expanding Airport: A Study of Service and Convenience for Washington...
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Description: Still from The Expanding Airport: A Study of Service and Convenience for Washington...
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Description: Still from The Expanding Airport: A Study of Service and Convenience for Washington...
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Description: Still from The Expanding Airport: A Study of Service and Convenience for Washington...
Figs. 1.11–1.18 From The Expanding Airport: A Study of Service and Convenience for Washington International, 1958, directed by Charles and Ray Eames. DVD screen captures
The problem of long distances and of the passengers’ need to walk them is laid out in three effective ways. First, the total distance walked by all passengers is depicted graphically: a map of the United States is marked with black lines going coast to coast as the narrator announces that that distance is translated into one hundred cross-country journeys plus twenty walks around the world (depicted by a globe with black lines circumnavigating it), plus four round trips between the earth and the moon, depicted with the addition of a moon now tethered to earth with lines that represent a trip between the two (fig. 1.13). The story is then told as that of the “average” passenger (a diverse group of passengers is melded into the silhouette of a businessman) whose journey is depicted in diagrammatic fashion as five times the length of a football field (fig. 1.14). The film warns that this problem will increase as airports expand to accommodate jet service. Here, the film changes visual idiom to great effect. To a soundtrack of stepping heels, the film cuts in quickly changing black-and-white documentary-style photographs of men, women, and children carrying their loads through long airport distances and getting more and more “irritated.” The slowdowns brought on by high-speed flights have transformed a romantic adventure into a major chore (figs. 1.15, 1.16).
The film is designed to show that the passenger and his movement are the priorities in the new airport. It touts the mobile lounge—a “spacious room isolated from fumes and noise”—as offering convenience and luxury. In addition, there is great value in the “freedom and flexibility it gives to airport planning.” In other words, today’s luxury would be tomorrow’s necessity, because the future had already arrived. There is little reference to the terminal building itself—the exterior does not appear once in the film—no doubt because it had not yet been designed. The terminal is sketched merely as a large central building from which the proposed solution, the mobile lounge, would detach.
The film predicts that the growing terminals would begin to shrink through the use of the lounge, as what used to be the fingers of the terminal would now detach and transport passengers to the plane, to which the lounge would seamlessly connect by virtue of a pneumatic door connection (fig. 1.17). This new process would also augment the airport terminal concessions, as passengers would patronize them in the main terminal before boarding the lounge, which would be open for only fifteen minutes. Additionally, the lounge addressed the challenges of constant change and the need for adaptation: “In the lounge, the passenger has started his trip and can be ferried to his aircraft from where it is most convenient from an operations standpoint” (fig. 1.18). The film closes against an airport where vertical takeoff jets and rockets represent the travel of the near future and whose introduction the new airport was already prepared to welcome.47Archival materials suggest they had written to NASA in search of prototype drawings for the vertical launch planes (rockets) that they imagined would soon be part of everyday travel, which did not turn out to be the case. Eames Papers, Box 201, Folder 14, Library of Congress. The film helped persuade the FAA to approve the key element of the Dulles plan for at least two decades, until the lounges began to serve newly built midfield terminals, suggesting that the airport had not anticipated the developments of the future as effectively as it had promised.
It is, of course, impossible to predict the future, no matter the intentions of “planners” or the success they realized in designing for growth at airports such as LAX. While that airport’s focus on functionality was hardly singular among projects oriented to meet the jet, it stands out from other airport renovations because its planners were so openly committed to building for change. Phased building would subsequently characterize all airport projects. But as early as 1960, the Los Angeles Department of Airports Annual Report explained, “We have learned that an airport system is never completed. Constant change is routine in airport operations; maintaining the status quo is synonymous with being ‘out of date.’”48DOA, 1960 Annual Report. Flight Path Learning Center, LAX. In a retrospective explanation of the design framework for LAX, Charles Luckman wrote, “We were then, in 1955, planning an airport to be constructed by 1960, which was to be large enough for 1980.”49Charles Luckman, Twice in a Lifetime: From Soap to Skyscrapers (New York: Norton, 1988), 299.
Inspired by an enthusiasm for the radical changes in travel that the jet had made possible, which drew Los Angeles into closer connection with the rest of the United States and outward toward the Pacific, and given its special role as a center of aviation, it makes perfect sense that Los Angeles International Airport, once merely the Mines bean fields of Inglewood sandwiched between the ocean and the oil refineries of El Segundo, became a shiny new example of what a jet age airport might be. By the fall of 1961, after nearly ten intensive years of planning and building, Los Angeles opened the first American airport redesigned for the jet age. How far planners had come in just seven years from when a concerned journalist remarked, “It seems incredible . . . that Los Angeles, which is perhaps the greatest center of American aviation—the largest industry in the nation and the state—should in the year 1955 still be operating with interim airport facilities.”50Marvin Miles, “LAX,” New Frontiers (Spring 1955): 5. The airport’s embrace of planning for obsolescence and expansion, its decentralization of terminals, and its emphasis on passenger movement aimed at “breaking the ground barrier” (the challenges of getting to the airport quickly), were innovations that set the terms for other airports. In fact, in the Dulles planning materials, Saarinen explicitly refers to the decentralized LAX plan, which he had consulted.51Eero Saarinen, “Dry Run Presentation,” July 1, 1958, 6. Eames Papers, Box 201, Folder 16, Library of Congress. Prescient site planning meant that the Los Angeles airport would handle anticipated increases both in the number of arriving planes and in the numbers of passengers flying well into the half century after its jet age redesign. LAX is one of the most outdated airports around today precisely because its flexible design never required the kind of major overhauls that rendered terminals such as TWA’s in New York so outdated as to be beyond use.52A new wing was added to the TWA terminal in 1969 to facilitate the introduction of jumbo jets. The building was landmarked in 1994 to prevent its destruction and overhaul, showing that it had outlived its use. In 2008, Jet Blue Airlines renovated the interior and reopened it as one the first new terminals built after September 11, 2001. The airline initially envisioned using the original TWA terminal as a ceremonial lobby but ended up bypassing it entirely to use the 1969 expansion. The airline announced in October 2015 that it would build a hotel there, which did not materialize. The “TWA Hotel” opened in May 2019.
Despite local challenges in obtaining funding for an airport renovation, the Los Angeles Department of Airports commissioned the firm of Pereira & Luckman to conceive a master plan in 1952. By that time, William Pereira, whose eventual contributions to the architecture and planning of Southern California are vast, had already left behind his work as a movie-theater architect for Balaban & Katz in Chicago and his subsequent career as an art director at Paramount Pictures for a career in architectural practice. That career included teaching at the University of Southern California, where he developed his interest in regional master planning. In 1950, Pereira invited the “Boy Wonder” Charles Luckman, with whom he had gone to architecture school in Illinois and who had been the president of Pepsodent and Lever Brothers, to join his practice. The team had already been commissioned to design CBS Studios when Pereira had his students create a new master plan for Los Angeles International Airport as an assignment, not really considering how and whether jets might change the airport experience.53Victor Cusack, A Symbol of Los Angeles: The History of the Theme Building at the Los Angeles International Airport, 1952–1961 (Virginia Beach: Donning, 2005), 21.
The first iteration of the Pereira & Luckman plan was completed for the DOA in March 1953. The pair based many of their ideas on those generated by Pereira’s students, including the central circular terminal housed in a glass dome, with fingers leading to the parked aircraft. An alternative scheme involved creating tunnels, rather than fingers, which left space on the apron for planes to maneuver and circle near the satellite where the tunnels emerged. This would shorten walking distances for passengers, a much-desired result. These ideas would develop into the final plan’s central innovations in form: decentralized terminals, with ticketing entirely separated from the gates; and invisible underground tunnels that were connected to the main terminal, rather than above-ground tunnels attached to protruding fingers like those at TWA in New York (fig. 1.19).
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Description: TWA Terminal by Saarinen, Eero
Fig. 1.19 TWA Terminal, circa 1962. Yale University, Eero Saarinen Papers
The DOA moved forward with Pereira & Luckman and in 1955 added new members to what would be a joint venture that also included the firms Welton Becket and Associates and Paul R. Williams. In the meantime, the DOA went back to the city with a bond issue of almost $60 million and a proposal for the airport to raise the money and pay their debts at no risk to the taxpayer. The measure passed with 86 percent of the taxpayer vote, and the design plans firmed up—just in time for the need to rethink them in response to the advent of the jet.
The proposed airport focused on operations and kept the plan oriented toward the functional rather than monumental. Specifically, the 1957 Master Plan broke with the idea of a main terminal building partially because the airlines preferred to operate their own terminals. In New York that had already led to elaborate architectures of distinction between companies, which one critic had called the “Penn Station–St. Pancras stage” (otherwise known as monumentalism in the form that those train stations had taken), in which tangible symbols were used as a form of advertisement to “create differences between airlines.” The race to iconization characteristic of Idlewild’s “Terminal City” plan, seen in TWA’s fanciful architecture and in the look of the Pan Am Terminal, with its distinctive umbrella-like building, for example, combined an interest in creating visual identity and a functional purpose.54Michael Brawne, “Airport Passenger Buildings,” Architectural Review, November 1962, 341–48. For the branding by virtue of the unit terminal system, see Thomas Leslie, “The Pan Am Terminal at Idlewild/Kennedy Airport and the Transition from the Jet Age to the Space Age,” Design Issues 21, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 63–80. At LAX, however, each airline’s ticketing terminal looked identical. The plan separated ticketing from loading through a system of underground tunnels that led to satellite terminals. As Luckman put it, “The only way to solve the complex problem of a modern airport is to separate the people from the planes.”55Charles Luckman talk at the Seagram Sales Meeting, July 1954. Charles Luckman Papers, Series 3, Box 3, Loyola Marymount University.
Decentralization of the airport terminals was the linchpin in a vision geared to achieving better continuity in travel between ground and air for what the planners bet would be new masses of travelers. According to Grant Anderson, the chief engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Airports during the era of expansion, with such decentralization planners could better manage passenger growth: “There is a limit to how many people can be processed in a single building,” he explained about the project in retrospect. The idea was to create a proliferation in the number of buildings that would separate check-in from departure, and such buildings would operate as interchanges rather than as holding places. Thus the designers gave particular attention to building tunnels that were 375 feet to 575 feet long, with “color, special lighting and decoration.” The tunnels used lighting effects to make them appear shorter. Some members of the LAX project also recommended installing moving sidewalks within the tunnels to further automate and speed the process. In 1964, the Astroway opened in the American Airlines tunnel.56Paul Friedman interview with Grant Anderson, March 28, 1997, Flight Path Learning Center, LAX; DOA, 1957 Master Plan, 18 and 20, Flight Path Learning Center, LAX.
The satellites themselves were elliptical, which enabled the planes to taxi right up to the edge of the building (figs. 1.20, 1.21). Each satellite boasted ten plane-loading positions; the removal of the fingers not only decreased walking distances for passengers but also gave the planes greater maneuverability. Passengers accessed planes in the two-story satellites by climbing a circular staircase lit from above by a glass dome (fig. 1.22). Each satellite could expand by a possible 50 percent with the addition of a mezzanine, an element that signals the expansion plans already imagined in the initial design. All of the satellites had restaurants with California themes, such as Old Hollywood and California Desert Flowers, managed by Interstate Host, a food supplier that specialized in concessions on toll roads and in steamship shopping centers.57“Facts About Interior Treatment of New Terminal Area Buildings, 1961,” DOA, PR Files, Flight Path Learning Center, LAX. The 1967 expansion plan, which Pereira designed after his split from Luckman, even proposed something he called a “holding gate” in the satellite buildings themselves, which consisted of a space in which enplaning passengers assembled. It was to attach and detach rather than act as a structural part of the satellite building. He called this a form of “mobile architecture” and was clearly influenced by the mobile lounge concept that had been introduced at Dulles in 1962.58Master Plan Development for LAX, 1966–67, 61, William Pereira Archives, USC. According to Thomas S. Hines, Architecture of the Sun, 690. Eero Saarinen had consulted the Pereira & Luckman LAX Master Plan as he designed Dulles. I have not found evidence of that in the Saarinen papers at Yale. For Pereira, the less permanent and durable the building structure, the better.
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Description: Aerial view of Los Angeles International Airport with elliptical satellite terminal...
Fig. 1.20 Aerial view of Los Angeles International Airport with elliptical satellite terminal on right, circa 1961. Los Angeles Public Library, Security Pacific National Bank Collection
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Description: Elliptical Satellite Terminal by Welton Becket Associates; Williams, Paul R.
Fig. 1.21 Charles Luckman Associates, Welton Becket and Associates, architects, and Paul R. Williams, Elliptical Satellite Terminal, Los Angeles International Airport, looking north from Satellite 7 building, 1961
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Description: Interior view of Satellite Rotunda from Master Plan Drawings by Unknown
Fig. 1.22 Interior view of Satellite Rotunda from Master Plan Drawings
Although Pereira viewed architecture as a “series of contrasting spaces which solve specific functional and aesthetic problems,” his work focused almost exclusively on creating functional and orderly spaces. For the airport, he and Luckman defined their challenge as moving people rather than planes. The “movement of people can be intercepted and diverted by architecture, just as a dam affects a river.”59Pereira, Journey to the Airport, 27–28. If a particular space required a passenger to slow down, Pereira simply proposed putting a rough surface on the floor. He wanted signs at the sides of throughways in order to divert people away from the main paths. In other words, not only did form follow function, it would expressly shape use and passenger mobility.
The lion’s share of the design effort went into the work of moving passengers from their cars to their planes as seamlessly as possible. Such priorities, however, made for poor symbolism. Public transport buildings may have been evolving past the St. Pancras train station phase, but critics and visitors also yearned for such things as emblems in order to “see” the otherwise diffuse and mobile experience of being at LAX and in fluid motion. The Theme Building appears to have filled that role.
Airport planners did not initially envision the Theme Building as the airport’s main symbol, since they reckoned that such a symbol would have to be explicitly functional. They imagined that the new control tower, the nation’s tallest such tower, which housed not only the air- and ground-control operations but also the DOA’s administrative offices, would stand in for their project. Its location at the airport’s eastern and then main entrance (now the Century Boulevard entrance) meant that it greeted the majority of passengers and visitors. So clearly important was it that the Control Tower was used to illustrate the DOA’s 1958 and 1959 Annual Reports. The 1958 report predicted that the “tower will be the identifying landmark of the airport and will serve a dual function.”60DOA, 1958 Annual Report, Flight Path Learning Center, LAX. The Flame of Freedom and court of flags were positioned in front of the 172-foot-tall building at the newly named address of 1 World Way. When the city of Los Angeles selected LAX to represent it in the 1962 Tournament of Roses Parade, the float featured both the control tower and the Theme Building (fig. 1.23). Additionally, when the airport put up its Christmas decorations, they lighted the tower with a cross, and the Theme Building, its whimsical partner, got its own Christmas tree atop it (figs. 1.24, 1.25).
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Description: Los Angeles Float, Tournament of Roses Parade by Unknown
Fig. 1.23 Los Angeles Float, Tournament of Roses Parade, 1962
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Description: Los Angeles International Airport Control Tower at Christmas by Unknown
Fig. 1.24 Los Angeles International Airport, Christmas 1962. Control Tower
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Description: Los Angeles International Airport Theme Building at Christmas by Unknown
Fig.1.25 Los Angeles International Airport, Christmas 1962. Theme Building
The Theme Building served as a legacy from the earlier plan, which had conceived of having a central building; this is what was chosen to be built in its place. Many people had a hand in the final details of the design of the structure, whose 135-foot-high parabolic arches were initially scheduled to be clad in aluminum for an even more futuristic look (budget concerns determined the use of stucco instead). Having imagined the space as occupied by a building, the DOA set out to give it a purpose, but even the persistence of its generic name, the Theme Building, suggests its lack of mission. Ever mindful of the airport’s need to pay its own bills, planners turned the building into a revenue-generating source: it would house a restaurant and an observation deck that charged admission (until the cost of maintaining it as a fee-paying space was not even worth the effort). It also housed Host’s enormous kitchen, which serviced all the satellite restaurants and offered a commissary for employees, on the ground level behind the perforated concrete wall that surrounded the circular base.
The Theme Building eventually outshone the more pragmatic Control Tower. It was open to visitors who could overlook the airport from an eighty-one-foot-high observation deck (fig. 1.26). In its first month of operation, the deck drew three thousand people. It was open seven days a week and would often host a thousand visitors a day during vacation months and on weekends.61DOA, 1962 Annual Report, 22, Flight Path Learning Center, LAX. Admission to the deck initially cost 10 cents. The entrance featured a “Court of Stars”—backlighted panels of color transparencies of the heavens taken at the Mount Palomar Observatory. The restaurant became a destination for those flying as well as for others who simply wanted to visit to see the people who flew in planes, anticipating their own future trips.
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Description: Observation Deck atop Theme Building by Unknown
Fig. 1.26 Observation Deck atop Theme Building, circa 1963
Jet age airports often had as many visitors as travelers. In the Theme Building restaurant, international tourist sites decorated the murals, hostesses dressed in costumes from France, Japan, Scandinavia, and Spain, and the menu offered equally international fare, such as “Swedish meatballs,” rather than local fare. At the Theme Building and the airport more generally, visitors could breach both time and space.
Most significant, the Theme Building’s lack of apparent purpose fostered the idea that it should have “style,” because style attracted visitors and defined the purpose of a jet age airport. The style that the architects chose clearly links the building to the broader landscape of Southern California’s already well-developed “fantasy architecture” and its greatest contributor: Walt Disney. If the fantasy architecture of Los Angeles had multiple ties to the movies (and Pereira’s earlier career as a film art director often is invoked to better grasp his design principles), an even tighter circle of designers connects the airport to Walt Disney, linking entertainment culture and urban infrastructural projects such as the airport.62Thomas S. Hines, Architecture of the Sun (New York: Rizzoli, 2010) and Philip J. Ethington, “Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge,” a multimedia essay to accompany the December 2000 issue of the American Historical Review. See the web essay at http://lapuhk.usc.edu/. By the time the Theme Building was being constructed, Pereira was already off the project, having split with Luckman, who took over the LAX project in the split.
In the Theme Building we can see a link between Welton Becket, Pereira, Luckman, and Walt Disney, whose own career in the movies had recently been eclipsed by the phenomenal success of his major planning project, Disneyland, which opened in July 1955 and was itself directly responsible for a great deal of the traffic increase at LAX in the period.63For more on the specifics, see Chapter Two. The airport and Disneyland were also linked in public discourse. In a preview article, the New York Times called the airport a “Disneyland for adults.”64Gladwin Hills, “A Disneyland for Adults,” New York Times, May 28, 1961. When the airport opened in 1962, FAA chairman and California native son Najeeb Halaby quipped, “You will have the first airport terminal area specifically designed for the jet age and it well may achieve some of the world-wide renown, some of the international acclaim as—who knows?—Disneyland.”65Speech by Najeeb Halaby at Airport Dedication, June 25, 1961, DOA, PR Files, Flight Path Learning Center, LAX.
By the time the planning team decided on the look of the Theme Building, Becket was already known for his “total design” concept, which characterized such projects as Bullock’s of Pasadena and the Capital Records Tower. Although there have been many ways to describe the concept, author Chris Nichols put it well when he explained that it involves “clear story-telling of an environment that is art directed to be both authentic and idealized, is visually calming, emotionally directive and effectively creates the feeling of stepping into another world.”66Chris Nichols and Charlene Nichols, Walt Disney’s Disneyland (Cologne: Taschen, 2018), 63. The airport’s iconic building and its flying saucer look was designed the year Disneyland opened. Becket and Disney knew each other well as neighbors in Holmby Hills, and Becket and Pereira, linked in the LAX joint venture, had worked together on the flagship theater of the Pan Pacific movie theater chain in the 1940s. Walt Disney, in the initial design phase for Disneyland, commissioned Pereira & Luckman to offer a preliminary study.67Karal Ann Marling, “Imagineering the Disney Theme Parks,” in Designing Disney’s Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance, ed. Marling (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), 58. Despite his rejection of their theme park plan, Disney hired Pereira & Luckman to design the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim from 1954–55, the same period in which they worked on the airport. The projects share a design dedicated to people-moving rather than to monumental architecture (fig. 1.27).68Donald W. Ballard, Disneyland Hotel: The Early Years, 1954–1988 (Riverside: Ape Pen, 2005).
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Description: Disneyland Hotel with tram and iron beams by Pereira and Luckman
Fig. 1.27 Disneyland Hotel with tram and iron beams, 1957
For reviewers and patrons alike, eager to interpret the airport, the Theme Building reinforced that one aspect of fantasy architecture is its futurism. As Life put it in an article about California, which included praise for the state’s many “free-wheeling shapes with a feel for the future,” the Theme Building at LAX is “all future, no past.”69“Special Issue: The Call of California, Its Splendor Its Excitement,” Life, October 19, 1962, 17. Airport public relations materials observed that the building denoted the airport’s “futuristic theme.”70Memo from Peggy Hereford, PR director, to Erwin Baker, editorial department, LA Examiner, September 25, 1961. Flight Path Learning Center, LAX. The Theme Building’s lack of function also assured that it was destined to last. The old Control Tower became so outdated that it was closed, and only the DOA offices remained there. A new air-traffic control tower, located much closer to the Theme Building in the middle of the field of operations, opened in 1996.
Armed with a vision that airports would always be obsolescent, the team led by Pereira & Luckman succeeded in defining jet age airport planning as antimonumental and in a constant state of becoming even while creating an icon. The Theme Building would stand as a symbol of the once-optimistic moment when airports produced what seemed like the future in the present, and to extend, for the first time, the wonder of jet motion to the mere mortals left to navigate the challenges of moving on the ground.
If an icon such as the Theme Building gave symbolic weight to a largely functionalist airport scheme such as that at LAX, Orly turned such airport functionalism into a kind of monumentalism of its own. It turned the airport almost into an exhibition.71For more on visits to other airports, see Nathalie Roseau, Aerocity: Quand l’avion fait la ville (Marseille: Parenthèses, 2012), 181–89, and Nicholas Dagen Bloom, The Metropolitan Airport: JFK International and Modern New York (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 70. Orly not only offered the spectacle of being technologically up-to-date but it also emphasized watching jets come and go, which helped make the sensationlessness of travel by jet an all the more remarkable accomplishment of the moment in air travel.
As much as any other airport, Orly defined the new jet age facilities and service. It had the most traffic of any continental airport and was second only to London’s Heathrow among airports outside the United States in jet traffic throughout the 1960s. More important, it offered proportionally more jet service than any other airport in the world during the early jet age and thus became associated with the plane’s novelty.72Conseil d’administration, “Rapport. Débats. Orientations générales de l’Aéroport de Paris,” August 1966, 4. ADP. In the U.S., service was distributed across many more airports, which therefore had proportionally less service by jet. Pan Am’s continuous jet service began with trips between New York and Paris in 1958 with service into Le Bourget, north of Paris (where Lindbergh landed in 1927), although the newer airport at Orly would expand to welcome the jets. While Boeing and Pan Am led the way in transatlantic jet travel, the French plane manufacturers and airline were not far behind. Sud Aviation introduced its Caravelle, which became a staple of middle-distance trips. When United Airlines purchased twenty Caravelles that year, the supply of planes became a thoroughly transnational affair, with France, one of the few airplane-producing nations other than the United States, supplying the U.S. for the first time. Air France also offered the largest air network, in terms of miles, by a single airline.
The Aéroports de Paris (ADP), an Association de 1901 (a private organization in the public interest), created in 1945 in the wake of the reversion of airports to civil traffic from military use in World War II, directed the renovation of Orly. The site required enormous reconstruction because bombs had all but destroyed the airfield.73“Vous entrez à l’aéroport de Paris” (January 1967): 11. 016.A69.3.6., ADP. Orly had originally served as Paris’s second airport when it opened in 1932 as a landing field after the main airport Le Bourget opened in 1919. It stood just thirteen kilometers from the city’s southern entrance at the Porte d’Italie, which spurred fantasies of speedy arrival to the center of town. Between 1949 and 1960, passenger volume at Orly quintupled from 720,000 passengers to 3,638,000, making it the world’s fourth-busiest airport after New York, Chicago, and London.74Installations Terminales Orly, April 1960. Air France Archives. Orly had been built to handle 4 million passengers per year and would expand to serve twice that number. The renovation also included a plan for a second expansion in the form of a second terminal, which opened as Orly West in 1971.
Orly looked like a big-box store; its enormity and emphasis on function created an antimonumental kind of monumentalism, especially by virtue of the length of its single façade (fig. 1.28). Despite Orly’s plainness, its scale impressed observers. As one analyst noted, “We understand the necessity of large-scale airports. . . . It seems important to magnify the image of the plane and man’s technological power.”75Lugassy, “Les attitudes,” 37. The main terminal consisted of a six-story structure above the ground and two stories below. Designed by architect-engineer Henri Vicariot, it was made of glass, aluminum, and stainless steel, which created a contemporary look and simplified maintenance (although the head of the ADP explained that they did need to devise a purpose-built machine with which to wash the windows). Pierre Boursicot, head of the ADP’s administration, described the terminal as “elegant, without wasteful luxury, but dressed nevertheless in noble materials that highlight the purity of their line and practical, practical above all else.”76Pierre Boursicot, Inaugural Speech, February 24, 1961. Box 37, Inauguration, ADP. The airport did not need beautiful decorative schemes; it impressed with its comprehensive offerings and its ability to process the numerous people going through it, which began with its link to the autoroute (fig. 1.29). Although planners boasted that the airport was the biggest building project in France since Les Invalides under Louis XIV in the seventeenth century, and that its length was the distance from the Opéra to the Louvre, they also celebrated the fact that the maximum distance passengers would have to walk would be no more than four hundred meters—about the length of a train platform.77Interavia. Revue Internationale de l’aviation 4 (1961).
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Description: Façade of Orly Airport by Unknown
Fig. 1.28 Façade of Orly Airport, near Paris, 1961
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Description: Autoroute to the Airport by Unknown
Fig. 1.29 Autoroute to the Airport, circa 1961
As a node in a system of travel, Orly functioned as a passthrough for passengers. Yet the airport also introduced elaborate non-flight-related facilities that we associate with the “aerotropolis” of today.78John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay, Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). See also Roseau, Aerocity. Orly became a rival city of the future, host to a large number of passengers laying over and waiting to board, passengers with time to spend before their flights departed since they now arrived at the airport on their own. Promotional material noted that the airport would feature a modern hotel with televisions in each room; a Hilton eventually opened at Orly, with ground broken in 1963 and an inauguration in 1965.79La Nation, June 8, 1963. Hilton, ADP. The airport boasted three restaurants on the third level, each of which could be accessed from the terraces. One of the restaurants was named Les Trois Soleils (The Three Suns) after the title of the enormous commissioned artwork that decorated its wall: a modern tapestry by Jean Lurçat, the key figure of the tapestry revival.80K. L. H. Wells, Weaving Modernism: Postwar Tapestry Between Paris and New York (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). The airport had, additionally, a huge bar, a three-hundred-fifty-seat cinema, and exhibition space for art shows. The following year, 1963, Félix Potin opened one of their first “super-marchés” at Orly. Publicity materials boasted that the store would be open seven days a week and noted that it was ironic that the airplane had given new life to the “centre commercial”—such early malls actually had been associated with automobile culture.81“Inauguration du super-marché de l’aérogare d’Orly, 17 Septembre 1962.” Dossier de Presse, Felix Potin, ADP. Orly’s role as a shopping destination would be further developed during the holiday season when, starting in 1962, the stores and restaurants offered late-night hours and free parking. Adorned with seasonal decorations, like department stores in the city, Orly envisioned itself as the new town square and even hosted midnight Christmas mass in the main hall starting that year (fig. 1.30).82Internal memo, dated Noël 1962. “Quinzaine commerciale Nocturne de l’Aérogare d’Orly,” 016.A.69.37, ADP.
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Description: Orly at Christmas by Unknown
Fig. 1.30 Orly, Christmas 1965
The new Orly incited such enthusiasm among Parisians that it became one of the most visited places in Paris from the late 1950s through the following decade.83Visits to the airport were common in the early era of the jet, and most airports created viewing platforms and restaurants that overlooked the arrivals area. See also, Schwartz, “LAX: Designing for the Jet Age,” 163–83. Road signs boldly instructed drivers, “Visitez Orly,” making clear that the airport was a destination in itself (fig. 1.31). An ADP film made in 1961 to promote the airport announced, “Anticipation is no longer a fiction. Today is the rendez-vous of progress.”84Commentaire, “Film-Orly-Terminal” script. Recorded November 13, 1961, 1, 141, A.61.3.1. “L’anticipation, ce n’est plus de la littérature. Aujourd’hui, c’est la démarche au rendez-vous du progrès,” ADP. This positive vision of Orly as the future that had already arrived could also take a dystopic turn, as is evident in Chris Marker’s well-known 1962 film La Jetée, which begins on the terrace at Orly. The film depicts a post–nuclear holocaust Paris where life has come to a standstill—even the images no longer move (his film consists of still images in sequence) (figs. 1.32 and 1.33 are the terrace in contrast).85La Jetée, directed by Chris Marker, Argos Films, black and white, 28 mins., 1962. Such avant-garde depictions as Marker’s function as a telling counterpoint to the mainstream culture detailed here, in which great enthusiasm for the jet age’s future present was promised, choreographed, rehearsed, and delivered in airports such as Orly.
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Description: Sign encouraging drivers to visit Orly by Unknown
Fig. 1.31 Sign encouraging drivers to visit Orly, early 1961
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Description: Still from La Jetée by Marker, Chris
Fig. 1.32 La Jetée, 1962, directed by Chris Marker. Argos Films/RTF. DVD screen capture
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Description: Observers on Terrace at Orly, still from La Jetée by Marker, Chris
Fig. 1.33 Observers on Terrace at Orly, circa 1961
Orly witnessed an enormous boom in visits in the years leading up to its renovation and upon the arrival of the jet. Between 1954 and 1957, the number of visitors to the terrace at Orly went from 32,321 to 647,563. In 1960, slightly more than a million people visited the airport and no doubt also saw the new terminal going up. In the year of the opening of the renovated airport and the new terminal, 3.5 million people paid to enter the terraces. Visits peaked at 4 million in 1966. Sundays, holidays, and summertime proved to be the busiest times, and as many as 40,000 people would visit daily. Between 1956 and 1966 the terrace at Orly became the second-most-visited tourist site in Paris, behind only Versailles (the Eiffel Tower, by contrast, had almost 1.8 million paid visits yearly). The architect speculated that visitors were mesmerized by the “the charm of the incessant movement of arrivals and departures.”86“Evolution de l’activité ‘Visites’” de 1951 à 1957, Memo, Secrétariat général, service commercial; “Comptes des résultats des visites,” Secrétariat général, service économique, service commercial, January 1962; Letter from Pierre Cot to Maurice Kungler, French representative to the IATA in Montréal, February 15, 1966, ADP; Rapport du Secrétaire général, “Réajustement des tarifs des visites pour la saison 1961,” 016 A.69.3.6, ADP; Cot, Interveravia 4 (1961), 016 a.69.3.7, ADP.
The terminal’s design, in fact, had anticipated such visitors. From the second through the sixth floors of the building, visitors could access public terraces that overlooked the tarmac. The new airport terminal offered 35,000 square meters in total of public terrace, most of which could be visited without even passing into the terminal building, confirming that the airport expected to host people who were not at Orly only to travel outside of Paris by plane. In addition, the airport was listed among the attractions in the Officiel des Spectacles in the 1960s, a guidebook to the French capital. For the cost of one new franc, which was half the price of admission to a museum, visitors could pass through turnstiles and be admitted onto the busy terrace, where they could watch the planes land, load, and unload, all accompanied by loudspeakers describing the activities (fig. 1.34). Such features as sound walls were built on the strip close to the terminals to shield people from the shriek of the jet engines. These were no doubt installed with onlookers as much as deplaning passengers in mind, since the onlookers would have been exposed to much more plane traffic than would a passenger exiting his or her own plane.
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Description: Terrace external entrance at Orly by Unknown
Fig. 1.34 Terrace external entrance, 1961
The terrace offered much more than plane-spotting. It became a sort of a jet age family picnic ground. While on the terrace, family members could eat crêpes, drink coffee, and sit on comfortable chairs and benches among well-chosen plantings. Children played in sandboxes (fig. 1.35). New-fangled vending machines on the terrace sold items for every member of the family: candy, ice cream, drinks, and even nylon stockings. The experience of making the purchases by vending machine was as important as consuming the goods, because it reinforced the futuristic and cutting-edge novelty of air travel, of the airport, and of being on the terrace itself.
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Description: Terrace with sandbox at Orly by Unknown
Fig. 1.35 Terrace with sandbox, Orly, 1961
For an additional fee visitors could take a guided tour of the airport, which included a bus ride around the airport to the hangars as well as a trip through the inside of the terminal itself, including descending all the way down to the belly of the heating and cooling rooms. Between 1957 and 1962, the ADP also offered a maquette of a Caravelle jet that was decked out in the exact interior of a real plane so that visitors could experience the thrill of sitting inside an airplane. During that early period, travel by plane, let alone by jet, was still limited to a relatively small group of French elites.87Letter from Pierre Cot to Maurice Kungler, French representative to the IATA in Montreal, February 15, 1966. ADP.
The airport authorities also functioned as if they were running a tourist attraction as much as an airport. A 1962 film made by the ADP about Orly spent most of the nineteen-minute run time on a virtual tour of the establishment, exploring the airport’s viewing facilities in particular. The camera lingered on the turnstile entrance, showed youngsters playing on the escalators, and filmed from within the restaurant looking out over the terrace and onto the tarmac.88Orly-Sur-Seine, directed by Pierre Zimmer and Jean-Marc Pipert, Les films du Chapiteau, black and white, 19 mins., 1962. Viewed at the Forum des Images, Paris. This perspective is also evident in a series of management memos. They note that visiting the airport was so pleasant and so popular that the admission fee should be increased for the first time since 1961, when the terrace price rose to one franc from half a franc. (The lower price dated back to the start of paid entry, 1954, before jet service had even begun.) “Visitors benefit from a very pleasant location that is also very comfortable: plenty of seats, excellent facilities, air-conditioning, and being able to be a part of the airport ambiance.” In April 1968 the management pointed out that it was much cheaper to visit Orly than other rival tourist attractions, such as the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, Unesco, the Musée Grévin (the most expensive entry fee of all), and the major art museums. The admission fee hike thus made prices more in keeping with the cost of admission elsewhere in Paris.89“Réajustement du droit d’accès à l’aérogare sud d’Orly,” April 8, 1968. 001 AH 055, ADP.
Admissions figures alone cannot complete the picture of the experience of such visits. A writer for Le Figaro described the atmosphere as something out of a Jacques Tati movie, which may well be why Tati opens his film Playtime at the airport. He noted that people amused themselves by incessantly going up the down escalators and elevators. For this reviewer, the airport had too many visitors and the wrong kind at that. He complained that they turned the continent’s “most modern airport” into an “amusement park like that of the glory days at Luna Park.”90Roland Merlin, “Orly, Pôle Touristique, Concurrence la Tour Eiffel” (August 17, 1965). 001 AH 055, ADP. The crowds at the airport irked other visitors as well. As one Dr. Jacques Meuley from Reims griped in a letter to the ADP in September 1966, he had come on a visit with his children to find the guided tours were already full and that the next tour was not leaving for two hours.91Letter from Jacques Meuley to ADP, October 3, 1966, and response from R. Layet, chef du service économique, October 12, 1966. 001 AH 055, ADP. Crowded, chaotic, and alive with the excitement wrought by anticipation, Orly became a vitrine of how the future of cutting-edge technology was being lived already.
One visitor described the airport as “a world apart . . . richer, more international, where you rub elbows with extremely exotic people, people of all colors . . . you have luxury items, you have escalators, you have bars . . . you grasp that here you have everything . . . everything that a person, that man could desire.”92Lugassy, “Les attitudes,” 43. ADP. This giddy visitor did not even mention the promise of far-flung travel. Instead, the airport was a glamorous, high-tech bazaar, a place where all anyone could want was already on offer. Observers envisioned, in this way, the airport of the mid-twentieth century in ways that very much resembled the department store or the World’s Fair in the nineteenth century. It is no wonder, then, that the airport also drew on these earlier models to become a spectacle in its own right.
As the jet age gave way to the era of the jumbo jet, it became apparent that it was difficult to anticipate and manage growth, and traffic jams to and in the airports ensued the world over. And the hijackings of the 1970s made clear that fluidity of motion could also be easily assaulted because it rests on a sense of liberal consensus about the value of free circulation. This, no doubt, previewed many of our current dilemmas regarding the costs of a world economy, the flow of information over the internet, and the new forms of global nomadism across a connected world. But this reality should not diminish our understanding of how people experienced the dawn of the jet age—a decade whose enormous technological optimism and embrace of rapid change and obsolescence in even the most permanent of spheres, architecture and the built environment, allowed people not only to take to the skies but also to reorient themselves in time and space through technology.
Nineteenth-century spectacles may have turned the universe into a garden. They had been monumental and iconic. The jet age airports, on the other hand, created not only a world that was actually smaller—to the extent that people could be transported around it more quickly than ever before—but also a world that changed how people moved on the ground. Such airports helped create a new kind of relationship between the built environment and the material world it stood for, and people’s relation to them, by shifting the focus of such spaces to how people might move through them. The jet age may have initiated a new culture of travel and even a culture of perpetual motion, but it is the fluid quality of that motion—of going without feeling—that characterized the aspirations of the jet age. That those involved in designing the spaces in and around air travel might extend that fluid motion to the ground, I have argued, was fundamental to how the jet age offered an aesthetic rather than simply a new mode of travel. That architects and planners who worked on jet age airports were able to transform their practices and embrace new values regarding how people related to the built environment in light of these changes is the complex story that needed telling. Although I have located this aesthetic as close to the jet as one might get, for the remainder of the study we will range, like the jet, farther and farther afield. I argue that the jet defined an era and did so by reconfiguring communications via ideas of transport and experiences of motion and mobility. Although the jet age airports described here were visited by millions in the period under consideration, by 1962 not one of them had as many yearly visitors as the place to which we now turn, and which remains the period’s outstanding purveyor of jet age aesthetics: Disneyland.
 
1     Ben Mutzabaugh, “Exclusive First Look: Inching Closer to Launch, TWA Hotel Unveils Room Design,” USA Today, April 16, 2018. »
2     Chandra Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Chandra Mukerji, Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); and Daniel Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). Bringing the United States into the narrative is Michael Adas, Dominance by Design (Cambridge: Belknap, Harvard University Press, 2009). »
3     Pan Am built its airline by flying to Cuba. While European powers initially used air power for mail and for shuttling diplomats, by the mid-1930s British Imperial Airways had over fifty-nine thousand miles of interconnecting airways and five hundred stops around the world. See Alistair Gordon, Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Revolutionary Structure (New York: Metropolitan, 2004), 76. »
4     An additional way to consider airport “symbolics” is to study airport art programs. See Alex J. Taylor, “Flying Machines: Calder and the Sensation of the Jet Age” (unpublished manuscript). Gordon’s Naked Airport offers a history of airport design and is a general cultural history of the airport. Gordon argues, however, that the airport supplied a “sense of movement, transition, and excitement that flight itself no longer provided” (177). »
5     Thomas S. Hines, Architecture of the Sun: Los Angeles Modernism, 1900–1970 (New York: Rizzoli, 2010); Deyan Sudjic, Norman Foster: A Life in Architecture (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2010); Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen and Donald Albrecht, Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Brian Edwards, The Modern Airport Terminal: New Approaches to Airport Architecture (London: Taylor and Francis, 2005). Sammy Goldenberg wrote an undergraduate honors thesis in the History Department at USC, “Rejecting Futurama: Los Angeles International Airport and the American Turn Against Growth” (2010). See also Vanessa R. Schwartz, “LAX: Designing for the Jet Age,” in Overdrive: Architecture in Los Angeles, ed. Wim DeWit and Christopher Alexander (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2013), 163–83. »
6     “Airport Cities: Gateways to the Jet Age,” Time, August 15, 1960, 68. »
7     “Allocution Inaugurale de Charles de Gaulle,” February 24, 1961. Box 37, doc. 19993055, ADP. Also published in Charles de Gaulle, Discours et messages: Avec le renouveau, 1958–1962 (Paris: Plon, 1979), 283–84. »
8     George Nelson, “Architecture for the New Itinerants,” Saturday Review, April 22, 1967, 30–31. »
9     See Vanessa R. Schwartz, It’s So French! Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 192–98, and Mark Dierikx, Clipping the Clouds: How Air Travel Changed the World (Westport: Praeger, 2008), 71. »
10     Richard Witkin, “U.S. Jet Starting Daily Ocean Runs,” New York Times, October 26, 1958. »
11     Robert Buron, Ministère des Travaux Publics and Transports, Inauguration of Orly, February 24, 1961, Orly Inauguration, ADP. »
12     Andrew M. Shanken, 194X: Architecture, Planning, and Consumer Culture on the American Home Front (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Amy F. Ogata, Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America (Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2013). »
13     Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning From Las Vegas (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972); Larry Busbea, Topologies: The Urban Utopia in France, 1960–1970 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007); Reyner Banham, “The Obsolescent Airport,” Architectural Review 132, no. 790 (October 1962): 252–53. »
14     Banham, “Obsolescent Airport,” 252. »
15     For excellent work on the Independent Group, see Anne Massey, The Independent Group: Modernism and Mass Culture in Britain, 1945–59 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); Lucy Bradnock, Courtney J. Martin, and Rebecca Peabody, eds., Lawrence Alloway: Critic and Curator (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2015); and Daniel Horowitz, Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). »
16     Lionel Brett, “Arrival and Departure,” Architectural Review 118, no. 703 (July 1955): 7–8. »
17     Jacques Block, “Planning Airports System in Paris Area,” Transportation Engineering Journal (May 1969): 253. 016 A.69.3.6, ADP. »
18     Banham, “Obsolescent Airport,” 253. »
19     Lockheed Aircraft Service, Proposal for Los Angeles International Airport Intra-Terminal Transportation System, 1960, 11. Flight Path Learning Center, LAX. »
20     William Pereira, Journey to the Airport (Pereira Associates, 1967), 13. Box 107, William Pereira Archives, USC Special Collections. »
21     American Airlines brochure, “Welcome Aboard Your American Flagship” (1959), 13. San Francisco International Airport Archives. »
22     “The Expanding Airport” (1958). Eames Papers, Box 201, Folder 16, Library of Congress. »
23     François Lugassy, “Les attitudes vis-à-vis du voyage aérien et de l’aéroport,” Phase B (September–May 1966): 89, 126. »
24     Lugassy, “Les attitudes,” 8, 11–18, and “Voyageur aérien, vu par le personnel travaillant en aéroport” (December 1965): 53. ADP. »
25     Interview with Paul Andreu, “La ville aéroport,” in La vitesse (Paris: Cartier/Flammarion, 1991), 116. »
26     Allan Temko, “An Interview with Eero Saarinen,” Horizons 2, no. 6 (July 1960): 123. »
27     Pelkonen and Albrecht, Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future, esp. Susanna Santala, “Airports: Building for the Jet Age,” 300–307; see also Alice T. Friedman, American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). »
28     “Expanding Airport.” »
29     Temko, “Interview with Eero Saarinen,” 123. »
30     John Harwood, The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945–1976 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 96. Harwood’s reading of ergonomics is as a post-humanist construction, which is interesting, but I question whether designers and architects such as Saarinen really imagined it that way. »
31     Antonio Roman, Eero Saarinen: An Architecture of Simplicity (New York: Princeton Architectural, 2003), 43, 60. »
32     Aline Saarinen, ed., Eero Saarinen on His Work (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 60; see also Nathalie Roseau, “The Obsolescence of the Monument, the Future of the Airport Icon,” in The Challenge of Change: Dealing with the Legacy of the Modern Movement, ed. D. Van den Heuvel, M. Mesman, W. Quist, and B. Lemmens (Amsterdam: IOS, 2008), 87–92. »
33     This connection appears important to me even though Kevin Roche implies that it isn’t possible. He said in an August 2, 2007, interview with Kornel Ringli, “As far as the concept of the building is concerned, TWA as a company has no input at all.” Ringli, Designing TWA: Eero Saarinen’s Airport Terminal in New York (Zurich: Park, 2015), 155. »
34     Ringli, Designing TWA, 58, 126. »
35     Dedication Program, Dulles International Airport, November 17–18, 1962. Eero Saarinen Papers, Group 593, Box 54, Series III, Folder 101, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University. Letter from Aline Saarinen to Sigrid Asmus, December 21, 1961. Eero Saarinen Papers, Group 595, Box 462, Series IV, Folder 1305, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University. »
36     Saarinen as cited in Allan Temko, Eero Saarinen (New York: G. Braziller, 1962), 115. »
37     Joseph A. Loftus, “At Dulles Airport, Traffic Is Light Year After Opening—Buses into Washington a Problem,” New York Times, November 17, 1963. »
38     “Dulles International Airport,” FAA Brochure (circa 1962). Flight Path Learning Center, LAX. »
39     “Mobile Lounge, Dulles Airport,” FAA Brochure (circa 1961). Eero Saarinen Papers, Group 593, Box 54, Series III, Folder 101, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University. »
40     Allan Temko, “An Interview with Eero Saarinen” Horizons 2, no. 6 (July 1960): 123. »
41     Report, E. W. Fuller, “A Proposed Mobile Gate House,” September 26, 1952. Eames Papers, Box 201, Folder 14, Library of Congress. »
42     Letter from Eero Saarinen to Robert McDonnell, July 25, 1958. Eero Saarinen Papers, Group 593, Box 462, Series Iv, Folder 1304, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University. See also Alexandra Lange, “This Year’s Model: Representing Modernism to the Post-War American Corporation,” Journal of Design History 19, no. 3 (Autumn 2006): 233–48. The idea has been credited to Saarinen, which is not quite right, since it also adapted the common practice already used in smaller European airports and an earlier proposed by an FAA report. »
43     “The Eames Design,” Public Broadcast Laboratory, interview with Edward P. Morgan, April 6, 1969, in Daniel Ostroff, ed., An Eames Anthology: Articles, Film Scripts, Interviews, Letters, Notes, Speeches (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 269. »
44     Letter from Aline Saarinen to Judy and Walter McQuade of Fortune magazine, January 8, 1962. Eero Saarinen Papers, Group 593, Box 463, Series IV, Folder 1310, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University. »
45     The Expanding Airport: A Study of Service and Convenience for Washington International, directed by Charles and Ray Eames, 1958. »
46     Amid Amidi, Cartoon Modern: Style and Design in 1950s Animation (San Francisco: Chronicle, 2006). »
47     Archival materials suggest they had written to NASA in search of prototype drawings for the vertical launch planes (rockets) that they imagined would soon be part of everyday travel, which did not turn out to be the case. Eames Papers, Box 201, Folder 14, Library of Congress. »
48     DOA, 1960 Annual Report. Flight Path Learning Center, LAX. »
49     Charles Luckman, Twice in a Lifetime: From Soap to Skyscrapers (New York: Norton, 1988), 299. »
50     Marvin Miles, “LAX,” New Frontiers (Spring 1955): 5. »
51     Eero Saarinen, “Dry Run Presentation,” July 1, 1958, 6. Eames Papers, Box 201, Folder 16, Library of Congress. »
52     A new wing was added to the TWA terminal in 1969 to facilitate the introduction of jumbo jets. The building was landmarked in 1994 to prevent its destruction and overhaul, showing that it had outlived its use. In 2008, Jet Blue Airlines renovated the interior and reopened it as one the first new terminals built after September 11, 2001. The airline initially envisioned using the original TWA terminal as a ceremonial lobby but ended up bypassing it entirely to use the 1969 expansion. The airline announced in October 2015 that it would build a hotel there, which did not materialize. The “TWA Hotel” opened in May 2019. »
53     Victor Cusack, A Symbol of Los Angeles: The History of the Theme Building at the Los Angeles International Airport, 1952–1961 (Virginia Beach: Donning, 2005), 21. »
54     Michael Brawne, “Airport Passenger Buildings,” Architectural Review, November 1962, 341–48. For the branding by virtue of the unit terminal system, see Thomas Leslie, “The Pan Am Terminal at Idlewild/Kennedy Airport and the Transition from the Jet Age to the Space Age,” Design Issues 21, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 63–80. »
55     Charles Luckman talk at the Seagram Sales Meeting, July 1954. Charles Luckman Papers, Series 3, Box 3, Loyola Marymount University. »
56     Paul Friedman interview with Grant Anderson, March 28, 1997, Flight Path Learning Center, LAX; DOA, 1957 Master Plan, 18 and 20, Flight Path Learning Center, LAX. »
57     “Facts About Interior Treatment of New Terminal Area Buildings, 1961,” DOA, PR Files, Flight Path Learning Center, LAX. »
58     Master Plan Development for LAX, 1966–67, 61, William Pereira Archives, USC. According to Thomas S. Hines, Architecture of the Sun, 690. Eero Saarinen had consulted the Pereira & Luckman LAX Master Plan as he designed Dulles. I have not found evidence of that in the Saarinen papers at Yale. »
59     Pereira, Journey to the Airport, 27–28. »
60     DOA, 1958 Annual Report, Flight Path Learning Center, LAX. »
61     DOA, 1962 Annual Report, 22, Flight Path Learning Center, LAX. Admission to the deck initially cost 10 cents. »
62     Thomas S. Hines, Architecture of the Sun (New York: Rizzoli, 2010) and Philip J. Ethington, “Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge,” a multimedia essay to accompany the December 2000 issue of the American Historical Review. See the web essay at http://lapuhk.usc.edu/. By the time the Theme Building was being constructed, Pereira was already off the project, having split with Luckman, who took over the LAX project in the split. »
63     For more on the specifics, see Chapter Two»
64     Gladwin Hills, “A Disneyland for Adults,” New York Times, May 28, 1961. »
65     Speech by Najeeb Halaby at Airport Dedication, June 25, 1961, DOA, PR Files, Flight Path Learning Center, LAX. »
66     Chris Nichols and Charlene Nichols, Walt Disney’s Disneyland (Cologne: Taschen, 2018), 63. »
67     Karal Ann Marling, “Imagineering the Disney Theme Parks,” in Designing Disney’s Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance, ed. Marling (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), 58. »
68     Donald W. Ballard, Disneyland Hotel: The Early Years, 1954–1988 (Riverside: Ape Pen, 2005). »
69     “Special Issue: The Call of California, Its Splendor Its Excitement,” Life, October 19, 1962, 17. »
70     Memo from Peggy Hereford, PR director, to Erwin Baker, editorial department, LA Examiner, September 25, 1961. Flight Path Learning Center, LAX. »
71     For more on visits to other airports, see Nathalie Roseau, Aerocity: Quand l’avion fait la ville (Marseille: Parenthèses, 2012), 181–89, and Nicholas Dagen Bloom, The Metropolitan Airport: JFK International and Modern New York (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 70. »
72     Conseil d’administration, “Rapport. Débats. Orientations générales de l’Aéroport de Paris,” August 1966, 4. ADP. In the U.S., service was distributed across many more airports, which therefore had proportionally less service by jet. »
73     “Vous entrez à l’aéroport de Paris” (January 1967): 11. 016.A69.3.6., ADP. »
74     Installations Terminales Orly, April 1960. Air France Archives. »
75     Lugassy, “Les attitudes,” 37. »
76     Pierre Boursicot, Inaugural Speech, February 24, 1961. Box 37, Inauguration, ADP. »
77     Interavia. Revue Internationale de l’aviation 4 (1961). »
78     John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay, Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). See also Roseau, Aerocity»
79     La Nation, June 8, 1963. Hilton, ADP. »
80     K. L. H. Wells, Weaving Modernism: Postwar Tapestry Between Paris and New York (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). »
81     “Inauguration du super-marché de l’aérogare d’Orly, 17 Septembre 1962.” Dossier de Presse, Felix Potin, ADP. »
82     Internal memo, dated Noël 1962. “Quinzaine commerciale Nocturne de l’Aérogare d’Orly,” 016.A.69.37, ADP. »
83     Visits to the airport were common in the early era of the jet, and most airports created viewing platforms and restaurants that overlooked the arrivals area. See also, Schwartz, “LAX: Designing for the Jet Age,” 163–83. »
84     Commentaire, “Film-Orly-Terminal” script. Recorded November 13, 1961, 1, 141, A.61.3.1. “L’anticipation, ce n’est plus de la littérature. Aujourd’hui, c’est la démarche au rendez-vous du progrès,” ADP. »
85     La Jetée, directed by Chris Marker, Argos Films, black and white, 28 mins., 1962. »
86     “Evolution de l’activité ‘Visites’” de 1951 à 1957, Memo, Secrétariat général, service commercial; “Comptes des résultats des visites,” Secrétariat général, service économique, service commercial, January 1962; Letter from Pierre Cot to Maurice Kungler, French representative to the IATA in Montréal, February 15, 1966, ADP; Rapport du Secrétaire général, “Réajustement des tarifs des visites pour la saison 1961,” 016 A.69.3.6, ADP; Cot, Interveravia 4 (1961), 016 a.69.3.7, ADP. »
87     Letter from Pierre Cot to Maurice Kungler, French representative to the IATA in Montreal, February 15, 1966. ADP. »
88     Orly-Sur-Seine, directed by Pierre Zimmer and Jean-Marc Pipert, Les films du Chapiteau, black and white, 19 mins., 1962. Viewed at the Forum des Images, Paris. »
89     “Réajustement du droit d’accès à l’aérogare sud d’Orly,” April 8, 1968. 001 AH 055, ADP. »
90     Roland Merlin, “Orly, Pôle Touristique, Concurrence la Tour Eiffel” (August 17, 1965). 001 AH 055, ADP. »
91     Letter from Jacques Meuley to ADP, October 3, 1966, and response from R. Layet, chef du service économique, October 12, 1966. 001 AH 055, ADP. »
92     Lugassy, “Les attitudes,” 43. ADP. »
Chapter 1. Fluid Motion on the Ground: Designing the Airport for the Jet Age
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