A recent report in Bloomberg News detailing accusations that Safdie Architects' much-Instagrammed Jewel Changi Airport design had been lifted from a proposed expansion to Doha's Hamad International Airport highlights the changing status of airport design.
The accusation was quickly debunked, as Safdie's designs date back to 2013 prior to the Doha airport proposal, but the dust-up itself, as Bloomberg's Adam Minter points out, signals that "Airports, though, are no longer mere transit nodes. Over the past few decades, countries throughout Asia and the Middle East have come to see them as tools for advancing their ambitions and expressing their national self-conceptions. In short order, they’ve become audacious sources of soft power."
With the worldwide proliferation of iconic airport designs and the growing (and environmentally problematic) proliferation of air travel, airports have taken on a new dimension, both as status symbols for rising economies and as economic engines in their own right.
A generation ago, OMA's Rem Koolhaas derided the amorphous airport typology in his seminal essay Junkspace, writing that airports represent part of a constellation of building types that signify modernity and its demise alike.
In 2001, Koolhaas wrote, "If space-junk is the human debris that litters the universe, junk-space is the residue mankind leaves on the planet. The built ... product of modernization is not modern architecture but Junkspace. Junkspace is what remains after modernization has run its course or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout. Modernization had a rational program: to share the blessings of science, universally. Junkspace is its apotheosis, or meltdown... Although its individual parts are the outcome of brilliant inventions, lucidly planned by human intelligence, boosted by infinite computation, their sum spells the end of Enlightenment, its resurrection as farce, a low-grade purgatory."
In fact, today, a constellation of high-powered firms are working on expanding existing airports and fashioning wholly new ones from Los Angeles to London, Beijing, and beyond.
Times have changed, haven't they?
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