On a Cairo layover, many moons ago, I went to see the pyramids along the Nile. I was utterly disenchanted. My adventurous illusions were shattered. There I had this idea about what the pyramids were supposed to look like from movies like Death on the Nile, Cleopatra, even from movies depicting orientalism and exoticism as something romantic, like Indiana Jones, Lawrence of Arabia, and even the swashbuckling Errol Flynn features I liked as a kid.
Alas, I found myself in the midst of a global open air mall with a Pizza Hut and American fast food brands, fighting off vendors trying to sell me pyramid keychains made in China. The commercialism around (rather: behind) this sacred site was probably at its peak. I had an idea of the aura of the pyramids. But reality was different.
The authenticity of a thing is the quintessence of all, but the technology of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the realm of tradition. By replicating the work many times, it substitutes a mass experience for a unique existence. It loses its aura.
In Greek mythology, Aura was the goddess of the morning breeze. The breeze is sensorial and gives impulses and new ideas. In cultural history, the aura is metonymic of energy, the halo, the glow and charisma of a character or work of art. Aura is uniqueness and defines the mythology surrounding it.
Aura is also the quintessence of a work of art, as defined by Walter Benjamin.
“What, then, is the aura?” asks Walter Benjamin in his treatise (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1935). “By reproducing the uniqueness of viewing the original, by enabling present-day masses to get closer to the work of art and by assimilating it as a reproduction (in print, photography, distribution), the object loses its uniqueness. The uniqueness of the work of art is identical to its embeddedness in the context of tradition, that uniqueness is its aura.”
Now, Benjamin talks about the actual reproduction of artworks by media and print. Yet his assertion can be translated onto any work of art, object, building or natural topographic site. The loss of the aura is preceded by the loss of the context of the aura. In this case, the commercialism with global fast food brands on a site next to the Pyramids of Gizeh was just bizarrely random.
It is through the phenomenological perception of the airport and our recreated emotions within it that architects try to guide us through this non-place.
The auratic that perseverates in an airport does so through the image and hapticity. Images and feelings are part of the auratic apprehension of the architectural work. The auratic becomes the iconic.
Which airports do I consider to be auratic – mythical, dreamlike and sensual (appealing to the senses)? In architectural writings, the term iconic or iconicity architecture are attributed quite liberally to a lot of postmodern megastructure “starchitect” buildings. The truly first iconic terminal was Eero Sarinen’s TWA Flight Center (1962) at John F. Kennedy Airport, New York. Here too, the iconography is eye-catching, evoking biomorphic forms from nature or even the wings of a bird in flight. This iconic terminal design became the branding device for its in-house airline, TWA.
In the age of the corporate showpiece movement, whose architects are SOM and Mies van der Rohe with their monolithic corporate skyscrapers in the international style, Saarinen’s organic masterpiece stood out against the formalism of the mid-century.
Finnish architect and theorist Juhani Pallasmaa understands phenomenology as “multi-sensory architecture”. In his book “The Eyes of the Skin”, he claims that in Western culture, sight has been historically regarded as the noblest of senses, with Plato regarding vision as humanity’s greatest gift. The invention of perspectival representation turned the eye into the center point of the perceptual world as well as of the concept of the self. Architecture is our primary instrument relating us with space and time and gives these dimensions a human measure. Pallasmaa believes that many aspects of the pathology of everyday architecture today can likewise be understood through an analysis of the epistemology of the senses and a critique of the ocular bias of our culture in general, and of architecture in particular. He claims that nihilistic, non-place architecture to us appears as mere retinal art of the eye. And that the loss of tactility causes architectural structures to become flat and devoid of authenticity.
Pallasmaa thus advocates a turn toward haptic experience, which is grounded in a gradual and slow comprehension of architecture because it affects all the senses and the body as a whole. Sensory experiences are experiences of touch – with our eyes, ears, nose, as well as the skin. Auratic architecture comprises all this.
In many modern airports there are spaces for haptic ineraction, such as the Cultural Experience Center located in Incheon Airport, which I mention in the blog about Incheon, where the passenger in transit can partake in craft and dance classes.
The auratic effect of airport architecture comes in various stages – through the synesthetic effects of viewership and travel; through architecture that appeals to the senses, through interior design and consumption, as well as through theatrical connotations – Grand Staircases and Mezzanine Levels to view and be viewed.
Sources:
TWA Flight Center, JFK International Airport. Photograph courtesy of Roland Arheger, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International. (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ehemaliges_TWA-Terminal_am_John_F._Kennedy_International_Airport_in_New_York.JP)
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Cambridge, 2008.
Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, 2005.