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Jet-Doric

TWA Terminal, Idelwild/Kennedy Eero Saarinen, architect

The public loved the soaring airport style. It made air travel more fun and non-flying sightseers came out just to look and take photographs. But while many applauded Saarinen and his imitators, others thought the their terminals were little more than overblown advertisements for the airline business, what one journalist called "three-dimensional billboards." Purists were offended by the flamboyance and impractical excess of these kinds of such sculptural structures. Not only were they expensive and difficult to build, but they were inflexible to the changing needs of aviation.

Peter Blake, editor of the Architectural Record, compared Saarinen's TWA terminal to an enlarged Danish Modern salad bowl. Ada Louise Huxtable, architecture critic for The New York Times, thought it represented all that was demeaning about the jet age: "The modern traveler, fed on frozen flight dinners, enters the city, not in Roman splendor, but through the bowels of a streamlined concrete bird," she wrote. If the dynamic styles of TWA and Las Vegas constituted a kind of Jet Baroque, there was sure to be a counter-movement, a return to classical forms and a more pristine kind of architectural elegance.

One final piece of the Idelwild/JFK puzzle remained to be filled in: an open lot at the north-east end of the loop, just to the left of the TWA terminal. The Port Authority had considered building a multi-use facility there for several domestic airlines that didn't have their own terminals. A design competition was announced and most of entries were predictably of the soaring/Saarinen school, including an undulating pavilion by Philip Johnson and a splayed concrete octopus by B. Sumner Gruzen. An unlikely entry by I.M. Pei, however, so impressed the jury with its elegant restraint that it was chosen as the winner.

Pei's concept was to compliment, not compete with the expressive character of neighboring buildings--in particular Saarinen's bird-terminal. "This was not a time to add to the chaos of the airport experience, but rather to try to alleviate it," said Pei, who wanted to create "island of conspicuous serenity." Presentation renderings showed a transparent pavilion that appeared to have no walls at all, just a flat roof suspended by sixteen flaring, bone-like columns while a pair of glass tubes led to the planes. As the design later evolved, the columns grew less organic and became minimal, Jet-Doric cylinders, made from cast concrete. The final version of the slab-like roof was composed of steel tetrahedrons hovering atop stainless steel bearings that were set in the tops of the columns to permit thermal expansion.

National Airline Sundrome, Idelwild/Kennedy. I.M. Pei, architect.

Pei believed that the skin-like effect of curtain walls was ruined by the use of steel mullions so a system of vertical glass stabilizers was used instead. These fin-like attachments were glued to the outside surface with clear epoxy to provide the necessary bracing. All opaque surfaces including the columns and the broad fascia, were either white or off-white in color. Travertine marble was used on the floors, and white-coated aluminum was used for interior partitions. It all made for a visually soothing pause in the cluttered skyline of the Idelwild loop. Automotive approaches to the building were kept on a single level to retain architectural integrity. A "split" roadway system was devised to bring cars to both sides of the terminal with departures in front and arrivals in the back. The multi-airline idea was eventually scrapped by the Port Authority and Pei's terminal became the base for National Airlines. While reduced in size, the purity of the original design survived and the "Sundrome," as it came to be known, was completed in 1969 and became the jumping off point for National's economy flights to Florida.

Similarly classical themes were adopted for several other airports of the period. Newark Airport, which had been allowed to fall behind Kennedy and La Guardia, re-opened with two pseudo-classical terminals that used a system of parabolic umbrellas cast in concrete and supported by tapered columns. There were sixteen columns across the front of each terminal--the same number as the Parthenon. "Our technology today has brought chaos," wrote Minorou Yamasaki, who designed a temple-like terminal for Eastern Airlines Terminal at Logan/Boston(1969). "We have speed, traffic, fear, congestion, and restlessness. We need a place to put our lives in balance." Pre-cast columns were spaced at sixty-foot intervals to create the feeling of airy suspension. Like Pei, Yamasaki wanted his terminal to be free of ugly ramps and structures so he placed the required parking area on the upper floors of the building and disguised it behind a grid of plastic and aluminum. Cars entered on the basement level and ascended to the roof on spiraling ramps concealed within the body of the building. (While he went on to design other airport projects, Yamasaki would be remembered best for designing another kind of aerial feat: the 110-story twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York.)

The most compelling and ironic shift away from jet-baroque tendencies may have been by Eero Saarinen himself. After considering several options, the federal government, in the form of the FAA, decided to build its own airport in Fairfax County, Virginia. When Saarinen was chosen for the job, he promised a "great entrance to the United States, not just another airport," and set out to improve on what he had done in New York. While at Idelwild/Kennedy he had been forced to work in a cluttered arena of competing architectural styles, here in Virginia the canvas was open and empty. The site was 9,800 bucolic acres buffered from urban sprawl by a forest, twenty-seven miles west of Washington D.C. near the town of Chantilley, not far from the Civil War battlefield of Bull Run. The government had decided to call it Dulles International after John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower's Secretary of State who had flown abroad on so many diplomatic missions during the Cold War.

Saarinen wanted to create a free-standing object, without any of the awkward additions that ruined other terminals. There would be no ugly fingers or boarding satellites, just a pavilion of white concrete rising from the plain of Chantilley. This concept was made possible through the invention of an odd-looking vehicle called the Mobile Lounge--"a cross between a bus and a waiting room"--that could carry eighty passengers from the terminal out to the planes. While it had its problems, the mobile lounge allowed the building to remain a pure, self-contained entity.

"Architecture consists of placing something between earth and sky," said Saarinen, and at Dulles he made the sky itself his medium, bringing it into sensual union with the earth. Walter McQuade, writing in Fortune, called the finished terminal "a gigantic oriental dreadnought riding the swells of a sea of land," but most saw it as a jet-age interpretation of classical themes. If TWA had been "bird-like," the terminal at Dulles was, according to Time magazine, "temple-like" with its columns, Medusa white concrete and elegant proportions. The 150-foot-span roof was shaped like an inverted shield, slung between sixteen slender columns that penetrated the curve of the roof through grommet openings. Walls and columns sloped outwards and there were no right angles anywhere except for a central down-spout that drained water from the great roof. The timeless effect was further enhanced by the way the terminal sat in its bucolic setting with the Blue Ridge Mountains as backdrop. As counterpoint to the sling-like roof, Saarinen gave the 193-foot control tower an exotic, Pagoda form.

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