JFK
After this pandemic-induced kerosene rehab, I finally got to fly again. First to Tokyo, then a few weeks later to Chicago, then to New York. How I had missed it! In Tokyo we were confined to pandemic room arrest though, it was not the usual three day stay but a surreal minimum night rest with hardly any contact with the outside world. It’s quite an experience, albeit not one I want to repeat again.
The flights weren’t fully booked, on the contrary. But we carried cargo, so at least that made sense for the company.
I took the featured photograph of Brooklyn Bridge on my New York layover in September. I’ve walked across it many times. Brooklyn was the birthplace of many iconic New Yorkers and artists, like George Gershwin, my favorite composer. Nowadays, literates like Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt live there.
Built in 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge was the longest suspension bridge of the world. It is such an iconic landmark of New York. Together with the Empire State Tower they are to me part of New York’s aura.
Idlewild Airport, which since has been renamed into John F. Kennedy International Airport, was the first masterplanned airport in 1946, and completed in 1956 by Wallace Harrison, one of Nelson Rockefeller’s personal architects and co-designer of the Rockefeller Center. Harrison had recognized early on that retail was one of the most important economic factors of an airport and had incorporated abundant retail space into this project. Forbes Magazine had calculated that one third of airport revenue was garnered through retail.
Harrison’s Terminal City of the size of 655 acres provided a central public place with water fountains modeled after French gardens and fountains from the 1800s, called Liberty Plaza. It was the size of a theme park, on the periphery of which were situated seven autonomous terminals, titled the Seven World Wonders. Liberty Plaza has since disappeared and now the interloping JFK Expressway and parking structures occupy that space.
The first one to open in 1957 was the International Arrivals Building by J. Walter Severinghaus & Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) which housed 14 different foreign airlines. This rather utilitarian terminal was replaced in 2001 by SOM’s Terminal 4, where my airline docks at.
Two particular terminals stand out from these Seven World Wonders. Juan Trippe, the CEO of Pan Am, wanted to excel himself and commissioned a terminal to show the people that Pan Am ruled the skies. Architect Walther Prokosch designed an elliptical structure, named the Pan Am Worldport, with a four-acre roof that was engineered to act like a giant umbrella, supported by 32 concrete piers. Jet planes could park directly under the sheltering roof at the terminal. This terminal opened in 1960 but proved too impractical in the long term due to the noise of the jet engines being too close to the terminal hall, thus it was decommissioned in 2014.
The second terminal that stood out at Idlewild was Eero Saarinen’s TWA Flight Center which he finished designing in 1960. The terminal opened into service in 1962, a year after Saarinen’s passing. Eero Saarinen (1910–1961) designed three airports in his lifetime – the TWA Flight Center (1956–1962), the Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C. (1958–1963; though technically that airport is situated in Chantilly, Virginia), and the Athens Airport (1960–1969). He also designed the Gateway Arch across the Missouri in St. Louis, which was completed in 1965.
For the TWA Flight Center, Saarinen drew inspiration from the curved, organic vaults of the Sydney Opera House (1957) by Danish architect Jørn Utzon (1918–2008). Saarinen sat on the jury selecting Utzon in 1956. Similar domed and curved airport architecture sitting on a plinth-like foundation at Lambert St. Louis Airport (1955, by Minoru Yamasaki, who also designed the original World Trade Center) provided further ideas to Saarinen.
The TWA Flight Center became the icon of the jet age and set a paradigm for iconicity and aesthetics in airport design. Saarinen’s expressive and romantic modernism was strongly based on Frank Lloyd Wright’s organic architecture, but he also took inspiration from Erich Mendelsohn’s expressionist curved designs and Alvar Aalto’s phenomenological approach to building.
At the beginning of the Millennium, the TWA Flight Center served as terminal for the airline JetBlue. Since 2019, it has been repurposed into a stylish, vintage-looking airport hotel. I haven’t stayed there yet, but I sure will!
When I returned to New York this September, I was so eager to take in the architecture. I strolled and strolled, grateful to be in my element again. I will soon add a blog about the architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings an Merrill (SOM). Their buildings and airports have defined the global architectural landscape for nearly a century.
ORD
I was also very happy to get a flight to Chicago O’Hare, ORD, in August, where I strolled even more. On my free day I walked 18km! Chicago is my favorite city. It is an architecture aficionado’s dream come true. The photograph below shows the Wrigley Building, designed by the local architectural firm Graham, Anderson, Probst & White between 1920-1924, in the style of the Beaux-Arts with elements of Art Deco. It was commissioned by the chewing gum tycoon William Wrigley Jr.
Art Deco was a very popular and defining architectural style of the 1920s and 1930s. It came to prominence at the 1925 Paris exposition of Modern Decorative Arts and the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago, with influences from Art Nouveau. In the United States, Art Deco progressed into a distinguished style of neo-gothic and ornamental buildings and skyscrapers with columns, spires, and applications of ancient Greek, Mayan, Aztec and Egyptian origins. In a way, the American Art Deco was the most creative of all architectural styles, allowing for majestic-looking buildings and interiors. Chicago is full of elaborate Art Deco buildings. Miami, too, but Chicago definitely is the epicenter.
One of the most striking Art Deco buildings is the Carbide and Carbon Building, pictured below. Situated on Michigan Avenue close to the Art Institute, it was designed by the Burnham Brothers in 1929 for the Union Carbide and Carbon Company. That company was tragically responsible for the Bhopal disaster in 1984 and was later acquired by Dow Chemicals.
At the beginning of the Millennium, the building housed the Hard Rock Hotel Chicago. This building is covered in black granite and gold leaves, and visually stunning.
Sources:
Alastair Gordon, Naked Airport. A Cultural History of the World’s most Revolutionary Structure, 2004.
Hugh Pearman, Airports: A Century of Architecture, 2004.
Steve Thomas-Emberson, Airport Interiors: Design for Business, 2007.
