Naked Airport Reviews:

• Book Forum
• The Boston Globe
• The New York Observer
• Publisher's Weekly
• The San Francisco Chronicle
• The Washington Post

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"Alastair Gordon scrutinizes airports as a microcosm of twentieth-century America, and it's all there--the technology, the architecture, the politics, the business, and the genius and daring that it took to meet the challenge of an ever on-rushing future. Naked Airport is as exhilarating as it is literate and informative."
--John Berendt, Author, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

"Alastair Gordon's 'Naked Airport' achieves the improbable, simultaneously reconnecting us with a sense of the early romance about flying and airports that none of us really ever experienced even as the story draws us inevitably to the tragedy of 9-11 and its horrific blend of aviation and architecture. Along the way, Gordon provides a truly compelling account of how airports had over the course of three-quarters of a century become the locus of not only modern dreams but post-modern nightmares as well. Don't leave home without it."
--Terence Riley, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator, Department of Architecture & Design, The Museum of Modern Art

Since its origins in the muddy fields of flying machines, the airport has arguably become one of the defining institutions of modern life. In Naked Airport , critic Alastair Gordon ranges from global geopolitics to action movies to the daily commute, showing how airports have changed our sense of time, distance, style, and even the way cities are built and business is done.

Gordon introduces the people who shaped this place of sudden transition: pilots like Charles Lindberg, architects like Eero Saarinen, politicians like Fiorello La Guardia, and Hitler, who built Berlin’s Tempelhof as a showcase for Fascist power. He describes the airport’s futuristic contributions, such as credit cards, in the form of fly-now-pay-later schemes, and he charts its shift in popular perception, from glamorous to infuriating. Finally, he analyzes the airport’s function in war and peace—its gatekeeper role controlling immigration, its appeal to revolutionaries since the hijackings of the 1960s, and its new frontline position in the struggle against terror.

Compelling and accessible, Naked Airport is an original history of a long-neglected yet central creation of modern reality and imagination.

"Reading Alistair Gordon’s splendid survey of airport architecture is like stepping into a time machine and bearing witness to all the ambition and angst of the 20th century itself. Naked Airport is highly erudite, extremely entertaining and a fascinating read."
--Carole Rifkind, author of A Field Guide to Contemporary American Architecture

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