Airport Gate as Holding Tank

A byproduct of a recent round-trip between London and Paris was the experience of using British Airways' new Terminal 5 at London's Heathrow airport.

To most Americans, the mechanics of flight departure at Terminal 5 would be basically normal, given the usual expected minor variations between airports. But this actually is just one of two major passenger processing alternatives found around the world. Consider Heathrow's Terminal 3, where non-British Airways flights to North America originate.

At Terminal 3 onc encounters the usual drill. First is passenger check-in coupled with a few security-related questions and details. Then one moves on through the usual security inspection process. Once "sanitized," the next destination is a mini-mall full of duty-free and other shops where you can trade your excess pounds for anything from a Cadbury candy bar to a Gucci purse. So far, pretty standard stuff.

The big difference comes when one leaves the shopping zone for the departure gate. In America, a departure gate usually amounts to a section along one side of a long, glassed-in hall where can be found a door to the aircraft ramp, a check-in desk and lots of seats for waiting passengers. But in Heathrow 3, that long hallway is flanked by what amount to holding tanks -- rooms containing the usual ramp door, desk and seating.

At least you are free to leave the tank, something you can't do elsewhere. In some cases, passengers go through a final passport inspection before entering the tank: after, they're stuck. Seems to me this was how it worked in Copenhagen.

Perhaps some people find all this lots of jolly fun. I think it's the usual processed-meat airport experience raised to the next higher power. Moreover, I don't find it necessary; the normal U.S. style procedures work just fine and eliminate some of the totalitarian overtones.

For what it's worth, here are some airports where I had that warm, fuzzy holding tank experience: Vancouver and Toronto (in the 1980s -- things might have changed since), Copenhagen and Heathrow 3. Mercifully, I can't recall how things worked at places such as DeGaulle 1, Orly-Sud, Helsinki and Frankfurt.

Crumbling Egos

Eric Felten's De Gustibus column in the 24 September Wall Street Journal (link here) has the intriguing title "Pardon Us, But Our Museum Is Falling Apart."

He cites defect examples that include the new Modern Wing of Chicago's Art Institute and I.M. Pei's National Gallery East Building -- the latter apparently needing an extensive re-skinning.

Then there are the cost over-runs. Felten mentions an addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum that was budgeted at $35 million but came in at $125 million, nearly four times the estimate.

What is going on here?

Radically designed buildings are essentially massive inventions produced and sold without prototypes. Is it any surprise they tend to be glitchy?

There have always been building failures (you would not want to have been standing in the choir of the Beauvais Cathedral the evening of 29 Nov., 1284). But the impractical nature of much current architecture has made it a pressing modern problem.

And then there's this bit that warms the cockles of my black little modernist-distrusting heart:

"The forms of traditional buildings, such as pitched roofs and moldings, almost always contribute to proper weathering, shedding water, and protecting the structure," says Steven W. Semes, a professor of architecture and academic director of Notre Dame's Rome Studies Program. "Modern buildings often assume shapes that do the opposite, directing water into the building rather than away from it."

I've been aware of the last point by virtue of living most of my life in the drizzly Pacific Northwest: essentially flat roofs are harder to drain than peaked ones.

But the point about large, flash, ego-statement building being engineering experiments hadn't sunk into my brain even though it should have years ago. Thank you, Eric, for highlighting this.

Cliche, Refurbished

Unisphere, shown during the 1964-65 New York World's Fair

Today's Wall Street Journal has this article about the refurbished Unisphere built as the centerpiece of the 1964-65 New York World's Fair.

The article by Tomas J. Campanella, "Icon of a Fair, a Borough, the World," provides a capsule history of the Unisphere and then offers examples of criticism leveled against it when new.

The 1964-65 World's Fair never lived up to its own high expectations, drawing only a fraction of the projected visitors. To critics, the Unisphere symbolized the banal, corporate atmosphere of the event. Newsday called it "deathly dull. It looks like an ad for Western Union." ...

Architectural Forum called it "a heavy, literal version of the ancient armillary sphere, with decoration by Rand McNally." But the people loved the Unisphere from the start.

No reference supports the assertion regarding public "love." I never heard any spontaneous expressions of it in the years I lived in the striking-distance zone of the city. But then, the subject of the Unisphere never came up in any conversations that I can recall.

My opinion? I admired the Trilon and Perisphere, symbols of the 1939-40 world's fair on the same site. In comparison, I thought the Unisphere was a gross cliché, poverty of imagination in the extreme. And I still think so.

Wings Over Rochester, NY

I lived in the Albany, New York area for several years and got to know the eastern half of Upstate pretty well. Because of my population forecasting job and the fact that I had a cousin living nearby, I occasionally ventured to Rochester and other parts of western New York.

Downtown Rochester, aside from the Genesee River cutting through it, always seemed standard-issue to me. Aside from one building.

That building, designed by Ralph T. Walker and completed in 1930, was originally home to the Genesee Valley Trust Company.

What distinguished it were huge, Moderne-Deco wings that capped the design.

In the top photo, those wings don't seem particularly out of proportion. But both in person and in memory they strike me as being huge. And a little odd, even though I'm a fan of Art Deco.

I find it hard to put a finger on the problem. The best explanation I can come up with is that, compared to the wings and supporting tower, the rest of the building is a little too plain. It seems to need more Deco decoration -- perhaps in the way of spandrels linking the windows vertically and more sculptural-relief elements on the part of the building below where the tower sits (not necessarily on the "back part" on the left of the top photo). In other words, transition elements are needed.

In any case, if you happen to travel to Rochester and are anywhere near downtown, take a short detour and give it a look.

Buffalo Before the Bust

A while ago I posted here about Detroit skyscrapers built in the Art Deco era before the automobile industry and, as a consequence, city growth hit the proverbial wall when the Great Depression struck.

Another hard-luck city is Buffalo, New York. Buffalo was home to Pierce-Arrow, a builder of low-production luxury cars, as well as auto industry-related factories. But Buffalo, an important city in 1930, wasn't so strongly tied to one industry. Its main reason for being was that it was located at a major transportation-break point. (That's geographer-speak for a place where goods are transferred from one mode of transport to another.) Such transfers require infrastructure, personnel and a number of support organizations -- in other words, a town will develop there and grow into a city should the volume of transferring cargo become large.

In Buffalo's case, the eastern point of unfettered Great Lakes inter-lake navigation is in the general area of Buffalo. After Buffalo, Great Lakes water plunges over Niagara Falls. (This claim no longer holds thanks to construction, starting in the 1820s, of the Welland Canal through Canadian soil. The canal originally was sketchy and went through two upgrades before the present canal was opened in 1932. Ships can steam from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario via the canal and its system of locks. But before the canal, Buffalo was as far as ships could shuffle off to.)

So Buffalo developed a harbor for Great Lakes ships. On the land side of the equation, the Erie Canal (later the New York State Barge Canal) was opened in 1825 followed by railroads a few decades later. Great Lakes cargo would move from ship to barge or rail car -- or vice-versa -- and Buffalo thrived. Over time, other industries developed; for instance, besides automobiles, by the 1930s Buffalo was an important builder of aircraft (Consolidated, Curtiss and Bell were based there at various times).

What finally brought Buffalo to its economic knees was the opening of the Saint Lawrence Seaway in 1959 that, at a stroke, drastically reduced transportation-break volumes. Subsequent attempts to turn the regional economy around didn't meet with much success and the city drifted from being a headquarters to a branch-plant town.

So much for background. Below are four important Deco-era structures of architectural interest that you can witness if you find yourself within striking distance of central Buffalo.

Postcard of Rand Building - 1929
The Rand Building is the least of the lot from a design standpoint. But it's tall and contributes to the city's character.

New York Central Terminal Complex - 1929
In the late 1920s the New York Central Railroad decided to rationalize its Buffalo facilities and created a major terminal not far to the east of downtown; other railroads also used it. The problem was that it was too large. I suppose the folks at New York Central extrapolated rail traffic and urban growth trends to support the case for such a large station. However, setting aside the Depression, rail passenger traffic had begun to peak as potential passengers shifted to cars, intercity buses and, later, aircraft to get around. After World War 2, traffic fell off alarmingly and the terminal complex became increasingly irrelevant.

Terminal Complex, aerial view

Liberty Building - 1925 - as viewed from the Rand Building
Those short towers (do they really qualify as towers?) are the most distinctive architectural features. Atop each is a small version of the Statue of Liberty. The scene in the picture is of interest because the relationship of downtown Buffalo to Lake Erie can be seen. Also, note the large structure between the Liberty Building and the lake: it is ...

Buffalo City Hall - 1931
I find Buffalo City Hall to be a truly impressive example of Deco-era skyscraper architecture; it generated a real "wow" reaction when I drove by it last year.

City Hall tower detail
The whole building is interesting, but the hard-to-see-from-the-ground top is a nice touch indeed.

The City that Almost Became

It grew like fury along with the automobile industry. Then it stopped in the Crash of 1929 before it had fully gelled.

I'm speaking of Detroit.

Towards the end of the 1920s some of the largest skyscrapers in the country were being built. Not far away was an art museum, a major library and a concert hall. Farther out along Woodward Avenue was a secondary office complex, the home of General Motors. But the Great Depression halted the formation of a central urban structure along Woodward. What there is, 80 years later, are the scattered bits of what might have been a truly great city.

In this post I want to focus on those skyscrapers that are unknown to all but Detroiters and architecture buffs. In particular, I'm featuring the skyscraper style dominant from around 1925 till the very early 1930s, when construction essentially ceased. (An exception was New York's Radio City that, thanks to Rockefeller money, carried that style through the decade.)

Let's take a look:


Downtown Detroit from an autogyro - 1931

First National Building - 1930

Book Tower - 1926

Guardian Building - 1929

David Stott Building - 1929

Fisher Building - 1928

Penobscot Building - 1928


Four of the six buildings shown were completed in 1928 and 1929 so it's possible that there would have been a glut of office space for a few years, absent the Depression. But if 1929 had brought simply an ordinary recession (which was possible, absent anti-trade legislation) the Woodward corridor would have continued its growth during the 30s. Skyscraper architecture probably would have tended toward the Moderne, following in the path of New York's new Daily News and McGraw-Hill buildings.

Just Imagining 1980

I'm the first to admit that I'm a sucker for 1920s skyscraper architecture. No wonder I've been fascinated for years by a few photos of a huge city-of-the-future (1980) model constructed as the backdrop for some scenes in the 1930 movie "Just Imagine."

This is what I'm talking about:



The movie itself is a rather odd combination of musical and science fiction featuring once-popular comic El Brendel, the scrumptious Jane of Tarzan fame Maureen O'Sullivan, and her love interest here, John Garrick. For information about the plot and other details, this is a useful source, and so is the Wikipedia entry here.

I, along with many others, had been informed for years that prints of Just Imagine were lost forever. Fortunately, that wasn't so. Googling will reveal several sources of Internet-based viewing sources as well as where one can find DVD copies -- the DVD offering at Amazon is here.

For your viewing enjoyment, below are some Just Imagine items I pulled off the Internet.


This photo includes tiny models of aircraft that lend believability to the movie.


Here's one way the model was used. O'Sullivan and Garrick meet high over the streets thanks to their aircraft being able to hover courtesy of small pop-up wingtip helicopter blades. (Real helicopters here still a gleam in Igor Sikorsky's eye in 1930.)



These are pages about the Just Imagine model found in a magazine called Modern Mechanics.

The movie eventually leaves the metropolis for a zip over to planet Mars where three guys (O'Sullivan stays behind) meet the Martian queen played by dancer Joyzelle Joyner, below.




Above is a closer look at Joyzelle.

Returning to the 1980 metropolis, its clear inspiration for Oscar-nominated art direction guys Stephen Goosson and Ralph Hammeras was the architectural rendering of Hugh Ferriss whose work essentially defines the 1920s skyscraper -- real, proposed or even imagined for imagination's sake. Here's an example of a city imagined by Ferriss:



I'll have more to say about Ferriss and his visionary city in a later post.

Nothing Doors

Something often downplayed or even missing in modernist architecture is consideration of the psychology of people who look at or use a building. This is in contrast to the Beaux-Arts style architectural training where students created renderings and building designs that evoked moods.

I was reminded of this not long ago strolling through the campus of the University of Washington when I spied this:

Law School building
It's situated near the campus periphery where newer, non-Collegiate Gothic architecture reigns. What struck me was the entrance area. Yes, once inside there is a large, high space with plenty of glass. But the doors themselves look like they came from a parts bin. The Great God Functionality worshiped by modernists would smile at form following the function of ingress and egress. But largely lost are the psychological functions of transition and perceiving the importance of the structure being entered.

What follows is a swing around the Washington campus showing entrances old and recent to illustrate my point.


This is one of the older buildings, named after Vernon Louis Parrington who taught at Washington in the early decades of the last century. The building predates the university's Collegiate Gothic phase and is undistinguished, as the entrance suggests.


Here is the main library building's front; there is no mistaking that this is the entrance area. The doors themselves are hidden at this angle, but are heavy, wooden, and have glass panes. Multiple doors are present to serve times of heavy traffic.


Nearby is the administration building, constructed in the late 1940s. It differs from most campus buildings in that it has no brick surfacing. A much more modest entry, but it is attractively designed aside from the University shield squeezed between the entrance frame and the bay window section above.


This isn't a main entrance. It's a side entrance placed where two wings of a building join. (Actually, the two present wings once were separate buildings that were consolidated several decades after they were built.) Unlike most modernist solutions, it possesses charm.


Here's an entrance to another building on the main quadrangle. It gives one the feeling that you are really entering a dignified place.


This is the entrance ensemble of what once was the womens' Physical Education building, now home of the Drama School. It's clearly an entrance, and clearly has a dignity to it.

So much for buildings mostly from the 1930s and 40s. Now for more recent doors and entrances.


Built around 1960, this Engineering building is one of the ugliest on campus. An effort was made to create a transition zone of sorts, but it doesn't succeed. The doors themselves are nondescript.


Another set of nondescript doors, this time on the Electrical Engineering building. All that glass and metal above the door is intended to create the sensation of ... well, I'm not sure.


The Engineering Library entry, like the rest of the late 1960s building, is a feeble attempt to blend modern with traditional.


Here's another blending attempt, this from the mid-1990s for one of the Business School buildings. Because it edges more towards the traditional, it strikes me as being more successful.

All of which is not to say that modernist and various breeds of post-modernist buildings can't have doors and entrances that have psychological resonance. But it takes some effort on the part of the architect, particularly one invested in classical International Style design.