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What Goes Up: In Plane View Norman Foster's Hong Kong airport brings the tarmac into the terminal.
The young architect from Foster and Partners' office who showed me around the new Hong Kong International Airport wanted to talk shopping. It wasn't just that he'd spent months sweating over aisle dimensions, signage control, and fire-suppression systems for the doorless boutiques in the airport's single, massive terminal; retail was a major force behind the project's form. As with all new airports, shopping is the financial foundation: at Hong Kong over 40 percent of revenues will come from retail sales, which makes the disposition of shops a crucial concern. Because every flight out of Hong Kong is international, all travelers have access to the duty-free shops, and the terminal moves you quickly into a giant shopping zone beyond check-in. It's possible to skirt the main mass of stores, but the outlying kiosk-style shops or the secondary clump at the far end of the terminal eventually snare you. From Pratesi to the Body Shop, these stores are the same ones you find in every other airport, and increasingly the same ones that fill the malls, line the streets, and supply the duty-free carts and catalogues on the planes themselves. This globe-girdling sameness can be found in the air as well, where the conditions of the flight--the duration of any given trip, the cabin interior, the flight path--are nearly identical from airline to airline. Travelers are relentlessly schooled in the narcissism of small differences, acquiring weird powers of connoisseurship. In the multinational transit system, tiny distinctions take on extravagant meaning--a few inches of space, a choice of movies, a meal served on a cloth napkin, a more nattily attired flight crew, free beer. (I'm always dismayed at my own willingness to fight for these minuscule perks, but I do because the larger experience tends to be so dreary, and terrifying, that these marginal privileges are crazily magnified.) And the same preoccupation with small choices characterizes airport shopping, where the lingering traveler may spend an hour weighing Godiva against Toblerone, Cutty Sark against Oban. How to create an architecture for such centers of multinational consumer culture? Almost every new airport--from Kansai to Denver--seems to adopt "high-tech" as its formal language. There are good, traditional, aesthetic arguments for this. An airport, after all, is the extension of an aircraft by other means, and there's a logic to looking at the formal language of aerodynamics as a point of departure. (Norman Foster, a man in the air as often as any, is devoted to aircraft, rhapsodizing frequently about flying his own jet.) High-tech is the high classicism of postmodernity, and the airport is its temple. Like the system of consumption it serves--in which slight variations assume an elevated significance--high-tech depends on a mastery of detail. The aplomb with which joints are fabricated and long distances spanned distinguishes great solutions like Foster's airport from dozens of competent but uninspiring structures with airfoil-like sections (the new Terminal One at JFK is a good example). In the dictionary of received architectural ideas, airports are often described as the successors to the grand spaces of railroad terminals, but this is only partially correct. Railroad stations offer two opportunities for dramatic enclosure. The first (and the most obvious direct precedent) is the space of the waiting areas and concourses, like the antechambers at the old Penn Station. The second is the train shed, like those of the Gare du Nord or St. Pancras. These vaulted areas are not simply for show but are arguably the most efficient way to cover a large number of tracks, keep the weather off the trains and passengers, and dissipate the smoke from the steam engines for which they were designed. What's ultimately striking about these sheds is that the transport vehicles are admitted indoors--as if the hangar had become the terminal. But like the experience at Grand Central, where a capacious circulation area leads to a dark and crowded platform, at most airports an awkwardly laid out seating area funnels into a cramped passageway clamped to the waiting plane. Foster's airport comes close to transcending this division between the planes and passengers. The building is enormously long, lofty, and transparent, and the whole technology of flight is spread out in the foreground: Jets nose close to the windows, takeoffs and landings are clearly visible. More than at any other airport I know, the experience inside embraces the activity on the tarmac. The plan of the building itself mimics the shape of a plane. A long fuselage that swoops in section like a 747 forms the central part of the structure, crossed on either end by wings raked like a jet's. And the terminal is a single volume that's covered, like a train shed, by a truly heroic roof composed of a series of metal vaults. My guide kept talking about clarity, pointing to the decent, if less than exceptional, graphics, but this was no more than signage. It's the architecture that pulls you forward, through a staggering perspectival corridor nearly a mile long. The stroll (or schlepp, depending on the amount of baggage you're carrying) can be accomplished on foot, by moving sidewalk, or underground, on a little robot train, albeit at the sacrifice of the sense of progression. The only misfortune is that the space culminates in a view of the homely control tower (not designed by Foster). Much of what's impressive about the project is its sheer magnitude. I'd be remiss if I didn't rehearse a few facts. During its (incredibly rapid) six years of construction, this was the largest building site on the planet. Chek Lap Kok, a sweet little island with a 345-foot peak, was leveled and then expanded 400 percent to an area two miles wide and three-and-a-half long. The $20 billion spent on the project financed not only the construction of the island, the terminal, the cargo-handling facilities, and myriad outbuildings, but also a high-speed rail line and a highway into downtown Hong Kong, a small city for airport employees, and one of the world's longest suspension bridges. According to a suggestive piece of publicity, the five-and-a-half-million-square-foot terminal--purportedly the biggest enclosed public space ever built--is "larger than London's Soho district." It contains 457,450 cubic yards of concrete, nearly 30 acres of granite, almost 25 miles of piping, 100,000 light fixtures, and 5,500 doors (not bad for a one-room building). It took 11,000 man days to draw and 13 million to build, has a baggage hall bigger than Wembley (or Yankee) Stadium, can now accommodate 35 million passengers a year, and could eventually handle as many as 87 million. While we live in a culture that overvalues size, this is a project that wears its enormity lightly. Part of the reason is the beautifully proportioned roof and, well, the sheer awesomeness of the great space. Of course, this space belongs to a class of structures--stations, stadiums, malls--that we expect to be big. At Hong Kong, though, this sense of expansiveness continues beyond the building. Turning right or left pulls the gaze across the tarmac, over the water, and to the verdant hillscape beyond, integrating the experience of the indoors with the out. This has the somewhat paradoxical effect of making the scale of the terminal feel more manageable. The comfortable quality of the space is also a product of its extremely regular tectonic character. The detailing of the building is elegant, but in many ways also rather austere, without the kind of in-your-face mechanical joinery that characterizes so much high-tech work. As a collection of details, the terminal has a slightly flat affect--it's a little bland--but it all works because the building never loses its focus on lightness and transparency, its resistance to clutter of any kind. Sometimes--especially in the so-called "binnacles," small structures that house air-conditioning registers, clocks, signage, advertising, and so on--the simple articulation and neutral color feel dull, but for the most part it succeeds by being crisply unobtrusive. Although a standard-issue Y-shaped plan was initially dictated by the master planners at HOK, Foster developed it into something much more interesting, transcending the familiar node-and-link mentality. The long spine is not simply a link as it is in other airports (think of Helmut Jahn's United Airlines terminal in Chicago, where parallel wings are joined by an underground space). Instead, gates are located all along the concourse, with jumbo jets lined up like so many pets. It's a nearly sublime room that organizes complex movement with simple generosity. Part of what makes this work is the architects' extremely canny decision not to modulate the gate spaces in any way, save with carpeting and chairs: no barriers, no walls, no interfering demarcation interrupts the continuity. It's easily the finest experience in the complex. There are others that are very good. The entry sequence from taxi or train takes you across gently rising bridges that fly over the arrivals hall to the check-in area, which stretches out on either side of the terminal under the lovely, low vaults of the undulating ceiling. The mass of shops forces the eye to one side or the other, creating the first--and most distant--confron-tation with the complicated scene of planes, water, and hills outside. By being relatively chockablock with signage, structures, activity, and movement options, this area also sets up the serenity to come in the great nave on the other side. The new airport is a replacement for old Kai Tak in Kowloon, which featured one of the most death-defying glide slopes in the history of aviation. Planes descended through a bristle of high rises, and passengers looked out their windows into domestic scenes that appeared to be scant inches away. The airport was an anticlimax. The new approach is far more stately, over islands and water, past little mountains, down the comfortingly long runway. The best thing the new airport offers, though, is the sight of itself. Those seated on the right side of the plane see the great, gray metal roof of the terminal in a superbly shifting perspective. It's a grand view. |
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