Quote:
Originally Posted by edluva
yes, it would if it were a defining piece of work. it'd be nice to see the billion plus dollars go towards a more noteworthy design. say what you personally will about barajas, beijing, incheon, or kansai, but those airports are the architectural landmarks of their time. they will be in textbooks 35 years from now whereas lax's expansion will be forgotten before it's even built. lax's expansion is a 1.5 billion dollar architectural yawn.
there's nothing "airport architecture" about the blocky columns and trusses in the fentress design. to use my favorite analogy, this design is to "airport architecture" what the 2005 mustang is to the 65 mustang. graceless mimicry. yeah, fentress has got some of the requisite "modern airport" features...you know, the curvilinear roof and the glass curtainwall, and yeah it's got a couple diagonally positioned walkways for kicks, as if incorporating a few elements common to noteworthy projects elsewhere qualifies as "modern airport architecture" - it's too bad this design lacks the originality, imagination, and the aesthetic lightness of its contemporaries. but it is "safe" and "inoffensive", which tends to be the best la can muster without being gaudy.
and i was exaggerating. it's more like an early nineties rendition of the something that might have existed in the late 80s.
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That is all subjective opinion, of course; and in my subjective opinion, I think Barajas Airport looks cool for what it is; I've only seen pictures of it, I've never actually been to Barajas, but I don't think it's cutting edge architecture. Wavy roofline, big deal. And I don't dig that tacky color scheme. I've also seen pictures of Beijing airport, not the others, but lemme guess: Steel roof trusses? Glass and metal? All typical airport architecture from at least the early 1990s. I first saw that when I landed at Stansted Airport, back when it was new. All of those new airports are basically some modified version of that.
IMO what was really cutting-edge airport architecture was Eero Saarinen's TWA terminal at JFK Airport. No airport terminal had ever looked like that before, and of course it was built at the dawn of the commercial jet age, so I think that's more significant in terms of airport architecture. BTW does the TWA terminal at JFK still exist?
Everything else nowadays is pretty much just a variation of the same theme.