This comprehensive guide to the planning and design of airport terminals and their facilities covers all types of airport terminal found around the world and highlights the environmental and technical issues that the designer has to address. Contemporary examples are critically reviewed through a series of case studies. This new edition covers the most recent examples of high quality, technically advanced designs from the Far East, Europe and North America. This book will be a source of inspiration and guiding principles for those who design, commission or manage airport buildings.

When Eero Saarinen s TWA Flight Center opened at New York s Idlewild (later John F. Kennedy International) airport in 1962 it was a sensation. It represented a significant change in architectural thinking. Trans World Airlines (TWA) initial commission to Saarinen was for a building suiting the airline s operational requirements to serve a fast growing number of passengers as efficiently as possible. At the same time, Saarinen s emblematic bird-like design allowed TWA to polish its image among air travelers, clearly distinguishing the company from other airlines in the intense competition during the early days if the jet-age in aviation. TWA clearly succeeded in capturing public attention for their architectural jewel, as Saarinen s iconic design got great publicity throughout its operational life until it closed in 2001 following TWA s takeover by American Airlines. Such use of a signature building has become very common in marketing for corporations, cultural institutions, and also for entire cities, e.g. Bilbao with Frank O. Gehry s Guggenheim museum. Although the TWA Flight Center was regarded an icon of the jet-age, it never really suited operational requirements. When Boeing introduced the B747 Jumbo Jet in 1970, the building already proved outdated and inefficient for the number of passengers using it. The new book "Designing TWA" for the first time tells the entire story of Saarinen s TWA Flight Center. The author Kornel Ringli, architect and publicist, has carried-out extensive research and brought together vast documentary material. He documents the terminal s architecture in the evident area of conflict between flight operations, design, and public relations. He also investigates how it remained an icon of jet-propelled aviation while never properly serving its purpose for just that industry. The book features a wealth of high-quality images showing TWA Flight Center in all its glamour and beauty, alongside many documents and plans. The concise text offers much detail and reaches far beyond many articles and previous smaller publications on one of the world s best-known pieces of architecture."

Three quarters of a million people are in a plane somewhere right now. Many millions travel by air each day. For most of us, the experience of being in an airport is to be endured rather than appreciated, with little thought for the quality of the architecture. No matter how hard even the world's best architects have tried, it is difficult to make a beautiful airport. And yet such places do exist. Cathedrals of the jet age that offer something of the transcendence of flight even in an era of mass travel and budget fares. Here are twenty-one of the most beautiful airports in the world. The book features: Wellington International Airport, 'The Rock' shaped like the dangerous cliffs of a local legend Kansai International Airport, Renzo Piano's gigantic project built on three mountains of landfill Shenzhen International Airport, a manta ray shaped terminal putting this booming region on the map Daocheng Yading Airport, the world's highest civilian airport in the middle of the Tibetan mountains Chhatrapati Shijavi International Airport, rising from the slums of Mumbai like a Mogul palace Queen Tamar Airport, a playfully iconic modern airport nestled in the mountains of Georgia King Abdulaziz International Airport, the gateway to Mecca resembling a Bedouin city of tents Pulkovo Airport, mirroring the city of St Petersburg with bridges, squares and art Berlin-Tegel Airport, ultramodernity, 1970s style Copenhagen Airport, an icon from the golden age of air travel Franz Josef Strauß Airport, sober and easy to negotiate, Munich's model airport Paris Charles du Gaulle Airport, the brutalist icon that launched the career of airport architect Paul Andreu London Stansted Airport, Norman Foster's return to the golden age of air travel Lleida-Alguaire Airport, a relic of Catalonia's early 21st century building boom Madrid-Barajas Airport, Richard Rogers and Antonio Lamela's calm, bamboo-panelled Terminal 4 Marrakesh Ménara Airport, a blend of 21st century construction and traditional Morrocan design Santos Dumont Airport, Rio de Janeiro's modernist masterpiece Carrasco International Airport, Rafael Viñoly's design inspired by the sand dunes of his native Uruguay Malvinas Argentinas International Airport, echoing the mountains and glaciers of Tierra del Fuego John F Kennedy International Airport, Eero Saarinen's glamorous jet-age TWA terminal Spaceport America, a vision of the future in the New Mexico desert

Historical accounts of racial discrimination in transportation have focused until now on trains, buses, and streetcars and their respective depots, terminals, stops, and other public accommodations. It is essential to add airplanes and airports to this narrative, says Anke Ortlepp. Air travel stands at the center of the twentieth century’s transportation revolution, and airports embodied the rapidly mobilizing, increasingly prosperous, and cosmopolitan character of the postwar United States. When segregationists inscribed local definitions of whiteness and blackness onto sites of interstate and even international transit, they not only brought the incongruities of racial separation into sharp relief but also obligated the federal government to intervene. Ortlepp looks at African American passengers; civil rights organizations; the federal government and judiciary; and airport planners, architects, and managers as actors in shaping aviation’s legal, cultural, and built environments. She relates the struggles of black travelers—to enjoy the same freedoms on the airport grounds that they enjoyed in the aircraft cabin—in the context of larger shifts in the postwar social, economic, and political order. Jim Crow terminals, Ortlepp shows us, were both spatial expressions of sweeping change and sites of confrontation over the renegotiation of racial identities. Hence, this new study situates itself in the scholarly debate over the multifaceted entanglements of “race” and “space.”

The bestselling author of The Architecture of Happiness and The Art of Travel spends a week at an airport in a wittily intriguing meditation on the "non-place" that he believes is the centre of our civilization. In the summer of 2009, Alain de Botton was invited by the owners of Heathrow airport to become their first ever writer-in-residence. Given unprecedented, unrestricted access to wander around one of the world's busiest airports, he met travellers from all over the globe, and spoke with everyone from baggage handlers to pilots, and senior executives to the airport chaplain. Based on these conversations he has produced this extraordinary meditation on the nature of travel, work, relationships, and our daily lives. Working with the renowned documentary photographer Richard Baker, he explores the magical and the mundane, and the interactions of travellers and workers all over this familiar but mysterious "non-place," which by definition we are eager to leave. Taking the reader through departures, "air-side," and the arrivals hall, de Botton shows with his usual combination of wit and wisdom that spending time in an airport can be more revealing than we might think.