Queenswalk: Come Fly with TWA to JFK, Part 3

The head of Trans World Airlines in the late 1950s, Ralph S. Damon, was a forward thinking visionary corporate leader, willing to take chances. For his company’s new world-class airline terminal at New York’s new International Airport, he chose a fellow visionary, Eero Saarinen, as the architect to bring that vision to life. “I want a building that starts your flight with your first glimpse of it and increases your anticipation after you arrive,” he told Saarinen. It must embody “the spirit of flight, inside and out.” Saarinen, one of America’s most innovative and futuristic architect/designers delivered. The TWA Terminal he and his team designed was a glimpse into a new future for anyone who passed through its doors. For more background on the airport itself, please see Part One. For an introduction to Eero Saarinen and his work, please see Part Two of our story.

Approaching the terminal on the roadway was like being in a science fiction movie depicting the far future. The organic swell of the building’s curves and glass walls was unlike anything most people had ever seen. When they passed through the doors, that feeling continued. The soaring spaces were punctuated with curved tunnels leading to the jetways, the organic “alien-ness” continuing in curved walls and surfaces.

There were no right angles, no harsh edges, everything flowed, designed to encourage the smooth flow of passengers to ticket counters, airline gates, luggage retrieval, rest rooms, and amenities. Behind the aesthetic pleasure of being in this futuristic beehive was a firm practicality, as even the most impressive terminal in the world would not be successful, if passengers couldn’t get on board their flights in a timely and efficient manner.

Eero Saarinen was an early frequent flyer. He travelled around the world for his work, and according to his wife, Aline, he hated most of the terminals he passed through. He thought them ugly, shoddy and inconvenient. So for TWA, he was going to design something beautiful and efficient. He and his co-designer on much of the project, Kevin Roche, had their team do a programmatic analysis of airport functions. They visited terminals in airports around the world, and took notes of what worked and what didn’t. They looked at every aspect of flight, and projections of what air travel would be in the future, using the airline’s data projected twenty years into the future, into the 1970s.

Their original ideas and designs were made into models, and then those models were analyzed, tweaked, changed, and the process begun again. Saarinen was a methodical, meticulous and very organized designer. Every contingency, every possible roadblock or design request was considered. The final design was gone over every which way possible before being introduced to TWA and the public. The team was sure the world would like the impressive design, but that really wasn’t the point. The point was making sure it worked.

An airline terminal in the 1960s had to have three paramount functions: provide quick and efficient service at check-in, up to the minute information on arrivals, departures and gates, and be able to get luggage back to customers in an efficient and orderly way. All of the other perks; the impressive waiting areas and creature comforts were nothing if you couldn’t get your ticket, get to your gate, or get your luggage when you arrived at your destination.

Fortunately for Saarinen, he was designing his terminal during a time of great innovation in airport and mechanical design. Automatic sliding doors had been developed, allowing passengers to smoothly pass from the curb into the building. Modern baggage conveyer belts and baggage carousels had also been invented. The large electronic signage we take for granted now had just been developed in the late 1950s, developed by the Solari watch company. They provided changing and up to the minute information on flights, and new closed-circuit television enabled the airline to deliver even more information to customers.

In 1957, when the Saarinen team was assembling its ideas, the technology of the Jetway was being explored. Those are the now familiar flexible enclosed hallways that join the terminal to the plane’s door, making walking on the runway itself and climbing stairs unnecessary. Because these ramps raised the height of the entrances up a story or more, to allow for the plane’s height, the architects were able to raise the height of the building and provide for the room needed for boarding first class and tourist customers.

Saarinen’s futuristic design meant that new methods of construction and new materials had to be invented as well. A small army of staff engineers and architects worked with the construction company, devising new methods of concrete construction. The engineers and contractors figured out structural buttressing calculated stress points and all of the details of construction. There are different kinds of concrete in the structure for different reasons.

Every detail of construction had to be carefully thought out and applied, so the finished building would be seamless and perfect. The building is one large monolithic form. Then the concrete had to cure. After the last of the structural concrete was poured, a year passed before the windows were put in. The entire terminal would take over three years to build. Construction was begun in June of 1959, and the terminal, not quite finished, but enough to function, was opened in May of 1962.

As the first passengers poured through the entrance, they were met with a wonder. The architectural critic, Edgar Kaufmann, Jr. described the interior as “one of the few major works of American architecture in recent years that reaches its full stature as an interior.” He loved the play of surfaces, the way the curves leaped and swelled, how the glass and the glazed surfaces bounced the light around, and the general feeling of lightness, of flight, that the building had.

He was also impressed that all of the details came together as a unified whole. He wasn’t the only one. Everyone marveled at how the four sections of the roof shells came together in the central space, a most modern of crossroads, and how the staircases met and flowed from this center joining the different levels, leading passengers to their various destinations. Every detail of the interior was well thought out. Even the ventilation ducts, which Saarinen called “air fountains” were designed and placed for optimal efficiency as well as aesthetic function. The café’s and club spaces on the balconies were organic in design and function.

The hallways were tunnels, rounded organic forms leading from what seemed to be one cave to another, all connecting to their respective gates or rooms. The airport was certainly a new and impressive place, but for the lucky children who probably “got it,” it was more than likely great fun. Saarinen’s TWA Terminal was hailed as one of the greatest buildings of its day, a monument of late 20th century Futurist design.

Unfortunately, Eero Saarinen never saw his greatest project finished. He died in 1961, a year before the terminal opened. His wife Aline was there to receive his accolades, and he was awarded the American Institute of Architects’ Gold Medal for his design posthumously in 1962. His father, Eliel, had won the medal himself, in 1947. Ralph Damon never saw it either. He died in 1956, long before a shovel was put in the ground. After President John F. Kennedy’s death, Idlewild Airport was renamed for him, entering the boom time of the airways as JFK Airport. Over the next fifty years, many things changed in the airline industry. It grew in leaps and bounds, must faster than any airline’s best projections. So did the planes themselves.

In 1969, the terminal got its first changes, as a new departure-arrival concourse and lounge was designed by the firm of Roche-Dinkeloo, the successors of Saarinen’s legacy. This addition was called Flight Wing One, and was designed to accommodate the new wide-bodied aircraft that were taking over the industry, planes like the Boeing 747. But although air travel was more popular, cheaper, and busier than ever imagined, the airlines themselves didn’t always survive the changes. Trans World Airlines was not doing well. During the 1990s, it was bought out by American Airlines, which had its own terminal. Eero Saarinen’s masterpiece shut its doors in 2001.

The Port Authority of NY and NJ owned the terminal, and they didn’t know what to do with it. The terminal and its interior were both NYC landmarks, designated in 1994. Their first idea was to make the terminal a conference center, but they wanted to surround it with new terminals, hiding it from view. The Municipal Arts Society and prominent architects A.M Stern and Philip Johnson were aghast. Surrounding the building with new terminals would strangle it, they said. The whole idea of the terminal was flight, air and light. Mummifying the building would be preserving the structure in amber for all the wrong reasons. Philip Johnson said in a presentation in 2001, “If you’re going to strangle a building to death, you might as well tear it down.”

The terminal building was opened for use as a set in Steven Spielberg’s movie “Catch Me If You Can” with Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks in 2002. In 2004, it was dusted off for an art exhibition called “Terminal Five,” which featured the work of 19 artists from ten different countries. It was supposed to run from October 2004 to January 2005, and would feature presentations, lectures and other events. Unfortunately, the opening party for the event was a rowdy festival of destruction, during which time the building was vandalized. The exhibition closed, and so did the terminal. That year, the Municipal Art Society nominated the terminal to the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s list of 11 Most Endangered Places in America.

In 2005, The Port Authority commissioned the architectural firm Gensler, out of San Francisco, to design a new terminal for Jet Blue Airways. It would incorporate the Saarinen head house; the iconic winged main part of the terminal, in its design. Peripheral parts of the old terminal would be demolished for the new terminal, which would have 26 gates to accommodate 250 flights per day, accommodating over 20 million people in the course of a year.

The new terminal was named “T5.” It wraps around the back of the Saarinen building, and keeps two of the iconic passenger tubes; one from the Saarinen era, the other from the Roche-Dinkeloo Flight One building. In keeping with today’s security and retail concerns, T5 has plenty of room for 20 security lines and equipment, as well as a huge passenger shopping hub with 22 food concessions and 35 retail stores, a space larger than many suburban shopping malls.

T5 opened with much fanfare in 2008, but the Saarinen building was not part of that. It remained closed, still without a clear plan of what to do with it in mind. There were plans to join it to T5 by means of the passenger tubes, but what to do with the building itself? Five more years have passed, and last year, in 2013, a plan once again emerged. The famous hotelier, Andre Belazs and his company, Balazs Properties will transform the terminal building into a Standard Brand hotel and conference center, with restaurants, stores and a flight museum. As of now there are no definite plans or opening dates.

Belazs has promised to not compromise Saarinen’s vision, declaring that Eero Saarinen was his “personal architectural hero,” and that his building will be respected and preserved. He’s going to have to go through the LPC and a host of interested and opinionated parties in any design he comes up with. We shall see. GMAP

(Photograph: NYC-architecture.com)