Let’s Build New Airports

Airports used to be symbols of the future; flying over the horizon to somewhere new, somewhere different. But not anymore. If you flew from Heathrow T5 to Xian Xianyang International Airport in Shaanix Province, China, you might think you’d flown in a big circle. Multi-storey, with wide, airy concourses; arrivals arrive at ground level, while above, a graceful Jetsons’ ramp feeds taxis and buses of passengers into the departure halls. If it feels as if there’s no visible difference between T5 and Xian, it’s because there isn’t. Each building follows exactly the same design.

We are told airports represent ‘good design’, just as we are repeatedly told by BAA and Boris Johnson that we need more of them. But as they wrap the word ‘environmental’ and that non-word, ‘sustainable’, into queasy arguments, we blindly accept the glass, and the brushed stainless steel.

Airports look similar because they have to be. Around the world the default language for air traffic control is English, the type face used on the taxiways is Siemens sans serif. In many terminals, Frutiger is used for signage. The flow is the same; we are simply told where to go and how to get there. These structures process people from the door to the gate and vice versa. There is none of that ‘romance of travel’ nonsense, only adverts that strive to point out how global difference can be conquered by the over-arching unilateral view of global banking.

The minimal design of airports is reminiscent of the aesthetics of dystopian Hollywood movies. The Minority Report look. Even the characters in their anonymous figure-hugging gun metal outfits appear to have bought their clothes from an airport Hugo Boss. Often they’re running around and everyone has a purpose and a place to be. Just like Stansted, Gatwick etc. You’re reduced to a traveller, a greeter or a worker. The point is, just as these films strive to emphasise an unnatural and de-humanising vision of the future, our airports do the same thing.

I’m sure that the architects and planners believe they are designing ‘happy’ places; buildings that deliver you swiftly, safe and sound with plenty of opportunity to shop along the way. But this belief in happiness is wrong. What is happiness anyway and why is it important?

No religion pushes happiness. Islam asks us to love and serve God. Judaism to follow His law, Christianity to follow Christ and atone for our sins. Buddhism is not about happiness, it’s about the ending of ignorance through knowledge.

So are airports nihilistic? They stand for nothing, they have no intrinsic value. They’re just places where a bunch of processes happen. No, airports are atheist buildings. Their homogenous quality refuses to accept the minutia of life, the dirt, the difference, our creed, our beliefs – it is we, who must conform to the rigid design.

Just as some atheists argue for reclaiming religion as an act of defiance against theism and advocate atheological debate, it’s time to reject the hollow philosophy of global design and start celebrating difference again. Airports should be exciting, they should be thrilling; we’re going somewhere new, we’re meeting a loved one.

There are plenty of places that do this. Railway stations often seem peculiarly reflective of their place: Grand Central Station is to Gotham what Didcot is to Didcot. There are even airports that play up their locality. Jakarta is a rare example of an airport to incorporate local design – with carvings, verandas and tumbling vegetation. As a building, it’s as a thrilling as the smell of cigarette smoke in Terminal 5.

Buenos Aires, 30 December

We step out of the subway and paper fills the air, falling from the open windows of a tall, blue-glass office building. Financial crisis? As we walk wind carries fragments of letters, records and spread sheets across the wide boulevard to collect in drifts by the newspaper kiosks.

In the Plaza de Mayo is a photography exhibition of the riots from December 2001. Just over ten years ago, what still threatens Europe, happened in Argentina. The country was in recession, the deficit was 2.5% of GDP, the IMF advised President de la Rua to cut $1.4 billion from his budgets.

Hopes were pinned on a quick bounce back, but within a year GDP shrank and Standard & Poor put Argentina on credit watch. More money was borrowed – from the IMF, the World Bank – economic ministers came and went – Ricardo Lopez Murphy lasted just eight days. There were strikes over cuts to civil service pensions, the highest-earning officials were effectively paid IOUs.

Then in December, Argentina failed to meet its deficit targets and the IMF withheld a $1.3 billion loan payment. People started to take their money out of the banks, flip it to dollars and send it abroad. The Government froze all accounts for 12 months. Then the riots.

Fire, petrol bombs, police beating people as their families try to drag them away – everything is larger than life with heavy contrast and saturated colour. This is as close as I ever want to get to a civil disturbance. This is blood in a drain, a man facedown and the cue-ball eye of a horse right in the camera’s lens. Here a helicopter carries de la Rua away from the palace and out of Government.

The Palace (La Casa Rosada) is at one end of the plaza and in the grounds we find an altogether different exhibition, one by the Government’s official presidential photographer – whose name escapes me (and Google) when I write later. Most of it centres on Nestor Kirchner, his death and succession by his wife Cristina Kirchner.

Argentina’s news is engrossed with the saga of her cancer, and the apparent cluster that’s claimed four other left-leaning presidents in Latin America;. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Fernando Lugo of Paraguay, Dilma Rousseff of Brazil and her predecessor, Luiz Lula. Is this a conspiracy? Yes, if you believe Chavez who points the finger squarely at the US. Is it a conspiracy that Kirchner’s thyroid cancer appeared at the time of her second-term election? Of course not. The glamourous Eva Peron of the 21 Century appears to be making a good recovery.

But plenty of older women look like they’re in shock – as they walk the streets with paper in their hair, or as they slice into manhole-sized steaks in the city restaurants. Don’t be fooled. They’ve not just seen one of the many dog walkers drag a maypole of tired, panting, hounds under a bus. It’s plastic surgery.

Everyone in Buenos Aires is beautiful – tanned gold, fair hair and immaculately turned out in considered wardrobe. Everyone gets old. At some point, a woman here must look in the mirror and make a decision; let time take its course or crash diet and pin anything loose behind the ears.

It’s terrible, but then what to do I know? I’m a man, and men in Buenos Aires check women out all the time. As we walk away from the square, T stops by a group of guys to ask why paper falls from the buildings. The main dude just blatantly checks out her chest and then works his way up. ‘Aren’t you freaked about by it?’, I’ll ask later. ‘No’, she’ll say, ‘It’s it’s like it has to be done before they can start talking to you.’ The only thing worse about being ‘spoken to’, is to be ignored.

So, what’s with the paper on December 30? The dude says, ‘It’s our last day of work, we finish at 11, throw our papers out of the window and then get drunk!’ ‘What about recycling?’ asks T. The dude and his friends laugh. ‘Recycling? There’s no recycling here!’

This is not true, as we walk on, pockets of Buenos Aires’ poor drag carts and collect the scraps to sell by the kilo to the paper mills on the outskirts of the city. By the Ministry of Defence we search for our birthdays in the remains of a diary. I pick up Sua Herrers’ X-Ray; March 10 2011. It looks like he (she?) has two left feet and a fracture across one dorsal surface. I hope medical records in the street are an indication of recovery.

I was in Buenos Aires only three days, but I want to go back; to the National Cemetery where we utterly failed to see Evita’s grave and to find the taxi driver who looked like a sour George Clooney. He’s there, patrolling the city in his crisp white shirt, with the seat pushed back as far as it’ll go. He still nods along to the blues CDs he keeps stacked up by the gearstick. I hope he picks us up at the airport. I hope this time he takes us to the hotel, instead of dropping us off next to a group of teenagers throwing bangers around with a curt ‘buena suerte’.