Terminalscapes: RELAMINATE
Finally, I'm posting the studio project derived from the Terminality series of essays posted last Fall.
Technology, furniture, security procedures, even the program of the airport have changed dramatically since we first upgraded from hangers next to the landing strip. However, the overall spatial strategy of the airport has fundamentally been the same since its inception. RELAMINATE proposes an intervention into Boston Logan's Terminal E that reconfigures the spatial experience of the modern airport to deal with the realities of contemporary security. An artificial landscape allows the habitable spaces of the airport to be expanded and contracted at will: the architecture becomes active in defining changes of use rather than reacting to changes of use.
The contemporary airport is a product of the most current iteration of international law regarding air travel and the most current economic trends effecting global airline alliances. These factors decide how many and what kinds of shops populate the airport, how many flights per day, where the flights are bound, &c. The airport is thus a place under constant programmatic stress always trying to adapt to a new set of requirements. Today we need extra X-ray stations, tomorrow the market demands more duty free.
Today�s terminals fail to accommodate this flux because they are designed using projections of capacity, not everyday realities. As the nature of the international terminal changes on daily, monthly, and yearly cycles we witness the specific ineptitude of a static design attempting to accommodate complex flows. This manifests itself as security lines flowing into ticketing, ticketing lines flowing outdoors, waiting rooms without enough seats, &c.
As with a previous project in the same studio, I started with the data. After compiling a schedule of the inbound and outbound flights I was able to derive a datascape which became the formal basis for the intervention. The connection between airside and groundside is created by alternating strips of the inbound and outbound datascapes which results in a series of depressions and rises. I then used the Americans with Disabilities Act's guidelines to rationalize the abstract datascape into a habitable form with accessible floorplates and usable spaces.
Each depression may be flooded to create an impasse. This allows the security personnel to focus their efforts on only the passable valleys. As traffic increases, more valleys are opened and more passages created which disperses the load. The raised strips between valleys become opportunities for occupation by allowing enclosure of shopping and administrative facilities. As more valleys are drained more program nodes become accessible as well.
RELAMINATE shreds the airport�s programs and scatters the bits across the landscape. This action increase the number of sites for each program and geographically spreads them across the length of the terminal. As needs ebb and flow, so too can the programmatic elements: shops, security lines, and lounges all open and close as needed. When not active, valleys are flooded to become impassable-- thus securable-- without resorting to cordons and camera clusters.
The daily process of flooding and draining, of opening and closing, uses the erratic daily life of the building to define its true spatial identity. At a site defined only by the laws which govern it, the new international terminal uses the data which courses through it-- the schedules, passengers, flight times-- to create its a new landscape. Smaller, more atomized, and more nimble individual spaces are re-laminated into a heterogeneous, rough landscape fully able to endure constant tectonic shifts.
Flooded valleys separate the airside of the terminal from the groundside.
Open valleys provide access to shopping and administrative facilities.
Opening the connection between air and groundsides across the length of the terminal allows views directly from the city to the tarmac and vice-versa.
Smaller, individual security stations are able to act with much more dexterity than centralized security facilities.
If you've read this far you may also be interested in seeing the final presentation board which comes in handy downloadable jpeg format. Be careful though, it's 2.3mb.
--Posted 06/15/04 03:40AM