Home
There’s no place like home. Just three clicks with her ruby slippers will return Dorothy home from Oz. The Wizard of Oz taught us all that home is where the heart is.
The importance of home as a safe haven has been a driving force in the movies of Steven Spielberg. In E.T. (1982), his little childlike alien phones home after a hapless stay on earth. The Terminal (2004) tells the story of an Eastern European stranded in a New York airport terminal for months because a coup d’état in his home country rendered him stateless. A premise inspired by a real-life asylum seeker from Iran who spent years in the transit zone of a Paris airport.
In our mobile society of the 21 Century, many people have become displaced, either through wars and migration, or through work. We become displaced when we are up-rooted and lose our emotional ties to home and heritage. We subconsciously seek a surrogate home or replica. Some find it at Starbucks, some at Disneyland or the local mall. Some are lucky enough to reconnect or rebuild their emotional roots and find their anthropological place.
The symbolic and emotional relevance of an airport is tantamount to freedom and progress in society. The powerful emotions felt when arriving or departing, have been described in literature and movies such as Casablanca, A Foreign Affair, The Terminal and many more, where the symbolism of the airport is metonymic of a last goodbye and final escape into freedom.
The architecture of public and transitory spaces is often times dehumanizing, alienating, uprooting. But gifted architects recognize the necessity of emotional security and a place of identity for the traveler. Home is the desire of many architectural endeavors. The spatial term the third place was created by American sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book The Great Good Place, depicting those places of modern civilization, where people outside of home and work can thrive and exist. An example of the third place is Starbucks, where tourists, locals, businessmen and students use the space as an in-between solution of home and work. Here, the third place is a synonym for the sociable places that people frequent between the realms of home and work – and those include airports.
The Arcades Project
The German philosopher Walter Benjamin shaped the cultural and social theories of the nineteenth and twentieth century like no other intellectual. His magnum opus is the Arcades Project, in German Das Passagenwerk.
The Arcades Project started in anthological form in 1928 and was left unfinished until its publication in 1983. Tragically, Benjamin perished in Spain while fleeing Nazi Germany for the US. It is an illustrious treatise of the oneiric (dreamlike) and awakening world in the cityscape of Paris, as well as the thresholds of everyday life in Paris, as experienced within its arcade architecture by the flâneur. Paris stands for the sophisticated, cosmopolitan modern world and its analogy with our work and commuter lives today prevails.
Walter Benjamin defines the nineteenth century as the age of dwelling in a shell as opposed to a house. He deems the contents of the interior shell a decoration and imprint of the user, which then again reflect on the exterior found outside in the arcades (shopping and dwelling places). He suggests that the user of the arcades wants to recreate their splendor (phantasmagorias) in his empty shell-home.
Benjamin sought out to portray the dreamlike quality of the city of the nineteenth century and the thresholds of architecture that determine it by calling the interior an asylum of art. The collector (consumer) is the true resident of the interior and creates his realm by accumulating commodities through which he can dream of a distant or bygone and certainly better world. To dwell means to leave traces, and the traces of the inhabitant are imprinted in the interior. As such, Benjamin names arcades, winter gardens, panoramas, factories, wax museums, casinos, and railroad stations the “dreamhouses of the collective”. If he were still alive today, he would include airports, too. Benjamin cites his friend Charles Baudelaire, who thought of the city as an immense interior, where at night you can close the curtains and light the candles.
Benjamin evokes the magic created by the passageways of Paris, such as their porches, vestibules and beautiful entrances, bestowing upon them a dreamlike quality. This answers partly or at least superficially our question about the relation to airports. Airports recreate certain city and home motifs that travelers can experience and identify with. The Benjaminian flâneur and city dweller brings the commodities which he acquires in the City Arcades home, to recreate his dream world. The flâneur in airports is seduced into acquiring commodities presented by dazzling displays and duty free shops.
This again establishes the connection to airports, many of which have been designed as dream houses and offer a temporary home, where passengers and workers dwell and leave traces and are dazzled by phantasmagorias. As some modern airport hubs take on the form of a city (Aerotropolis), the comparison of an airport with a city lies at hand. Singapore Changi’s Airport Terminal 3, for example, offers a Butterfly Garden to saunter and forget about the travel hassles. Like a beautiful city park, which offers a refuge from work and the burdens of life.
It is all dreamy and cushy to be able to experience this resort-style feeling when flying away or in transit. But it is also artificial and mechanical, like the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard writes about the house in the big city. According to him, a house like that lacks cosmicity (aura) because it is no longer set in its natural surroundings. Thus, he concludes that really any inhabited space that has been appropriated by humans serves as home. How we decorate it, is up to us.
The dazzle and the phantasmagorias are modern day Potemkin Villages. Dreamhouses are too good to be true.
Sources:
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1969.
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, (1928-)1983.
Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafes, coffee shops, bookstores, bars, hair salons and other hangouts at the heart of the community, 1989.
Penny Sparke, The Modern Interior, 2008.
