I stumbled upon a fascinating article by Chris Sloan at CNN Travel about this mid-century gem of an airport.
Originally named Moisant Field after a famed aviator who died there in 1910, that airport has since been renamed after the great American trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong in honor of what would have been his 100th birthday (2001).
The vaulted dome complex was inaugurated in 1959 after a design by architects designed by Goldstein Parham & Labouisse and Herbert A. Benson and George J. Riehl. But it starkly resembles the design of Minoru Yamasaki’s St. Louis Lambert International Airport (1956), famed for preceding the expressionist dome architecture of Eero Saarinen’s organic TWA Terminal.
Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport’s new terminal by Cesar Pelli overtook in 2019 from the dated, yet historically worthwhile original building, with intentions of preserving the latter. Pelli passed in 2019 at the age of 92, among his most famous architectural creations were Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Towers (1997).
What particularly captured my mind while reading this article is the fact that the original mid-century airport terminal is being preserved and repurposed as a hybrid space. From film productions to a skate park, intentions for reusing that space further along as a social and economic place to be are abundant.
Something similar has been happening to Berlin Tempelhof Airport as well. After closing for operations in 2008, much conundrum has happened there, but the building has been preserved. Since the European refugee crisis of 2015, that terminal has been housing refugees and migrants, and during the pandemic it served as a vaccination center.
Here is the link to the CNN Travel article:
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/new-orleans-old-msy-abandoned-terminal/index.html
Sources:
Postcard photographs in the public domain, by Grant L. Robertson
Chris Sloan, CNN (https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/new-orleans-old-msy-abandoned-terminal/index.html)
Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects, https://pcparch.com
Categories: Airports
