Prologue

Any technology gradually creates a totally new human environment.
- Marshall McLuhan

It was my cousin's last day in America--August 26, 1964--and he wanted to see the World's Fair before flying back to London. My father drove us in his Buick to Flushing Meadow. The sky over Long Island was tempered blue and streaked with contrails. We bought tickets for General Motor's Futurama exhibit and rode around a miniature landscape that showed what life would be like in the future. My cousin and I were disappointed. There was something hoaky about the whole fair and the so-called future seemed frankly shabby.

After the fair, we drove south a few miles on the Van Wyck Expressway and reached the periphery of Idelwild, which is what my father still called the airport, although it had been renamed John F. Kennedy International the year before. We glided along freshly paved overpasses and beneath the signs bearing candy-colored numbers. The terminals were strung out like pavilions around the looping roadway and it felt as if we were back at the fair. There was the flashy stained glass entry to American Airlines, the flying saucer roof of Pan Am, and the endless glass facade of the arrivals building. Then we parked in front of the TWA terminal and walked inside.

I had seen photographs of the bird-like structure, but none had done it justice. The interior was a continuously flowing surface of cast concrete. There were no sharp corners, no right angles, no dull flat ceilings. The building was topsy-turvy--in some places the walls swooped down to become floor, while other parts curved above our heads like ocean waves about to break yet were somehow frozen in place. Between the vaults were gaping ellipses of glass through which you might see a tailfin or a passing cloud. I was only twelve and knew nothing about architecture, but the pavilions at the Worlds Fair seemed stodgy in comparison. This wasn't pretending to be the future; this was the future. Those were real Boeing 707's sitting on the tarmac.

The air was charged with anticipation. Pilots stepped through pools of milky light. Beautiful stewardesses trailed behind them wearing trim red outfits and perfectly straight stockings seams. The ambient lighting; the flirtatious smiles, the lipstick red carpet and uniforms; the cushioned benches and steel railings curving around the mezzanine--all conspired to work on the senses. Even the clock that hung from the ceiling had a sensually globular shape. We sat in an oversized conversation pit, beneath a panoramic screen of glass, and watched the service vehicles scoot between the planes. "This is unbelievably cool," said my cousin in a hushed, almost reverential tone.

When his flight was announced, he walked up the long umbilical departure tube, turned once to wave, like an astronaut, and then disappeared into the boarding satellite at the far end of the tube. There was an otherworldly, Twilight Zone quality to his moment of departure--as if my cousin were flying not to London but to Mars. Perhaps it was the recessed lighting or the curved walls that made for the slow-motion, spacy feeling. Perhaps it was the subtle rise of floor that made the boarding tube seem hyper-extended, much longer than it actually was. All I knew was that I didn't want to leave just then. I wanted the moment to continue.

Departure tube at the TWA terminal Idelwild/Kennedy Airport, circa 1962

Still, we headed back onto the Belt Parkway and drove east into the slanting afternoon light. I was unsettled for the rest of the drive: my cousin's departure had been dream-like and elusive but, at the same time, very real. This was the essential modern moment--when technology seemed at one with human aspiration, before hijackings and air rage, before jumbo jets, before deregulation, dysfunctional baggage carousels and electro-magnetic scanners.

Over the next few years I flew frequently but never on TWA until I took a student year abroad. My flight had been booked on another airline, but it was canceled because of a bomb threat at JFK. It was Black September, 1970. There were bombs going off everywhere. The only available flight to Paris was on TWA and I was able to transfer my ticket, pleased to get the chance to return to that inspiring terminal again and walk up its mysterious boarding tube.

I pushed my way through a mob of angry German tourists--their flight had been canceled as well--and noticed how some of the openings had been boarded over with ugly sheets of plywood. The glacial sheets of glass were grimy. The too-bright lighting cast garish shadows on the undulating concrete walls that now looked cracked and dry--the texture of old chewing gum. The bright red carpeting was badly stained and curling at the edges. The stewardesses looked haggard.

My plane was almost empty except for a group of plucky women from Dallas who were heading to Paris on a shopping spree and weren't going to let any terrorists ruin their fun. Drinks were free and when the plane touched down at Charles de Gaulle, everyone stood and cheered. The next few flights I took across the Atlantic were on cheap charter planes and I learned to lower my expectations. Air travel had become an ordeal to be endured, not enjoyed. But I always wondered what had happened in that brief interval between the perfect airport moment of 1964 and the dissapointments of later years.

As air travelers, we remove ourselves from the experience by thinking about something else, but we are never altogether comfortable with the airport process. Instead of being thrilled--as I was at 12--we are more often than not horrified or bored by the reality. We check our bags and pass through security. We stand on the moving sidewalk and learn the status of our flight from a computer screen. We are both repelled and attracted at the same time. Some react with air rage, incensed by the impersonal nature of the setting. Others feel oddly light-headed, disembodied, or experience, as Joan Didion once wrote, a "certain weightlessness". Most of us just want to reach our destination as quickly and safely as possible.

A sign at an airport construction site today reads: "Excuse our appearances. We are tearing down yesterday to make room for tomorrow." But the idealized "tomorrow" never comes. The airport is at once a place, a system, a cultural artifact that brings us face to face with the advantages and frustrations of modernity. Its history has been a recurrent cycle of anticipation and disappointment; success and failure; innovation and obsolescence. This book traces that history through mutations of technology, design, and marketing--showing how the airport was gradually shaped into a new kind of human environment, while in turn, shaping the rest of the modern world.

Prototypes | Friendship | Jet-Doric | Astroway | Epilogue