The enclosed spaces of airports often feel separated and distant, linked by corridors and concourses whose forms join together in a sprawling organic structure. The airport asserts itself across the landscape, living according to its own laws. Airport architecture can be seen as the ultimate example of Lefebvre’s “lived obedience”, causing the passengers and visitors to move only in the directions allocated to them and visit only the spaces to which they have designated access.
Hidden systems manage and monitor the building. Air conditioning, information, alarms, escalators – the airport is a network of intelligence and energy. Passengers are silently cared for and moved in the right directions at the right time, obedient to the processes of the airport.
Passengers arrive and depart. Friends and family are shut off from those taking them to the airport or picking them up, watching them only as they disappear through security or emerge unannounced from collecting their baggage. The purpose of the passenger’s visit dictates not only where the passenger is allowed to go, but also what they are allowed to see.
As a visitor watches their family member or friend depart through the appropriate door or cordoned off space, what emotions do they experience? Is the sense of loss – however temporary – heightened by the fact that the vehicle in which their companion will be carried into the air remains unseen and anonymous? Unlike a train station, the cathartic process of watching the train until the last moment of visibility is often prohibited.
Similarly, the arriving traveller may feel unsure of the person who awaits them, and this feeling is enhanced by the passage the arriving party must follow to find the face which is probably already existent in their mind’s eye. The sense of being rushed along with a group of unknown fellow travellers until bursting into the space where faces will search yours, ascertaining whether or not you are the person for whom they wait, is not dissimilar to that of entering a stadium from a dark passage, or a crowded meeting room from a silent corridor. The scrutiny of those awaiting arrivals is surely strengthened by the sense of unknown, created by the closed off spaces of arrivals and departures.
The balances between several oppositions add to the emotional pressure of the airport experience, beyond the dictated values created by procedures, security measures and designated spaces. These include the balance between outside and inside the airport zone, the exterior and interior of the airport building: the visible and invisible.
Threshold 4 brings sight to the activities hidden by the processes
and structures of airport space through multi-screen displays
and pioneering software systems. In so doing, the art works created
interact directly with the passenger’s experience of arriving
and departing. With these digital installations, exterior and
interior spaces and activities are allowed a new relationship,
and the balance of the visible and invisible can be tipped in
new directions.
Next Threshold 5 took us
back to the idea of smallness, intensity and portability.
