Terminality Part 2/3
See also: Terminality 1/3 and Terminality 3/3 and a design project derived from these ideas: RELAMINATE.
As a built work attempting to address the needs of a slippery program, the modern airport is always constructed as a snapshot addressing the present best solution to an evolving equation. Forced to continually satisfy the current requirements of the most current equation, airports have instituted a system of informational malleability and spatial ambiguity. Riding on the edge of obsolescence, the terminal's identity arises from overlaps of inefficiency-- X Ray machines in the check-in lines and check-in lines in the security areas, etc.-- precisely the areas where programmatic elements collide and destroy spatiality in the process. Passengers make their way through the terminal amidst a war waged between the airport's physicality and its information system's supreme malleability. The latter has little regard for the former and thus the ontology of the airport is one of disfunction. The information seeks a spatial container as malleable and ambiguous as the code that sustains it yet the physicality of the passengers and their cargo defies this desire.
A network of LCDs and LEDs directs the flow of passengers through the terminal. Although a static sign bearing airline insignia marks the entrances to the terminal, subsequent station points are defined not by physical matter-- ink on paper-- but by light in the form of LCD and LED displays. Check in stations may be reconfigured at will based on a common-use methodology thanks to the lack of static signage. Flat screens in the security lines allow the TSA to update screening procedures easily, McDonalds has deserted words in favor of animated French fries always dropping fresh into a jacket, and the usual arrival and departure screens dot the waiting areas. Occupation patterns in the terminal are a direct result of manipulations of the content and placement of digital information.
By allowing the reconfiguration of information systems in the terminal, programmatic elements are liquified. The terminal's specific programs at any given time flow together above a topography of information. Changes in the informational substrate are relayed in the form of the programmatic flow and further reflected in the location of populations within the terminal.
Populations become located in the terminal as a result of the interaction between the informational topography and the flow of program above it. Changes in the functional requirements of the terminal result in tectonic shifts of information followed by a reconfiguration of program and populations as they both adjust to the new informational topography.
In this way, the terminal's meshworks of specific programs and information systems operate in concert against top-level programmatic definitions and their concomitant spatial delineations by undermining them. Programmatic envelopes defined at the time of design have lost their integrity before construction begins. Spatial details designed to locate and enhance the program of the terminal become obstacles to efficiency. With knowledge of this impending confrontation the terminal commits spatial suicide while still on the drawing board: information in the form of text, icons, and furniture takes over. The terminal is stillborn in order to avoid any judgment of its ability to survive in the world.
This text refers to specifics of Boston Logan International's Terminal E. However, more and more airports are switching to digital signage.
--Posted 11/05/03 05:42PM