Denver International Airport Page 4
John Raimondi’s Dance of the Cranes, an upward-sweeping, intertwining, 60’ bronze statue, guards Omaha’s Eppley Airport entrance; buy Omaha Steaks at Eppley and have them shipped anywhere in the world. Drinking and bar conversations with strangers are both best in O’Hare. LAX pays more homage to the automobile than the 747, but of all the Great World Airports, Lincoln, Nebraska, still boasts the shortest distance from a passenger’s seat on a plane to the driver’s seat in your car. Dulles, Kennedy, La Guardia; North Platte, Montreal, Toronto, San Juan, Vancouver, Cleveland, Vienna, Johannesburg, Taiwan, Geneva, Albuquerque, Rochester, Oklahoma City, Albany, Paducah, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Detroit, Grand Forks, St. Louis, Des Moines, Miami, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Atlanta, New Orleans, Paris, Edmonton, Calgary, and Lethbridge. There must be half a dozen others. My readily-remembered list seems woefully provincial; at century’s end, it would have to be ten times as long, ten times as varied, with time in the field locally, to qualify me as much of a traveler. Thus Marcus Binney has a valid point, in comparing the last decades of our century to the last decades of the 13th: if 1250-1280 was the Age of Cathedrals, then 1950-2050 is the Age of Airports.
“Every capital . . . and many small islands, want a spacious, impressive terminal that will give arriving passengers a memorable and welcoming first impression of their country’s modernity and sophistication,” writes Binney. For this impression, Denver spent $3.2 billion, Pittsburgh spent $815 million, and Austin, Texas, $615 million. Architectural firms obviously are drawn to such spending. HNTB specializes in noise abatement; Leo A. Daly specializes in air traffic control towers; Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum provides store planners and landscape architects; Pascall + Watson parlayed its flight catering designs into a series of airport projects. In the late 60s and early 70s, Kivett and Myers tried to merge the car and airplane at Kansas City, but never achieved Lincoln, Nebraska’s car-to-plane minimum distance because of perceived security problems arising from potential terrorists.
To a passenger stuck between planes, bored to tears by the surrounding cell phone conversations, or hustling to make connections, rent a car, or get to a convention hotel, airport architecture seems to be written in a language consisting of newsstands, seats, restrooms, baggage handling devices, fast food outlets, and giant television screens. But the real vocabulary of airport design is the beam—steel, aluminum, I-shaped or circular in cross section, gracefully curved, tied into rigging by cable, often reminiscent of modern America’s Cup racing yachts (Binney uses the terms “masts” and “anchors”). At Denver International, the Teflon®-coated fiberglass roof, rising as a tent city into 130 foot peaks, is held aloft by vertical struts and tied down by horizontal ones; the cables resemble nothing so much as a superspider’s handiwork; assembling this giant web of steel must have been fun, even for the guy with a wrench as big as his arm. O’Hare’s Terminal #5 is a mechanical drawing done in steel, its graceful silhouette intersecting with myriad rectangles, an arrangement so visually captivating that it must touch an uncharted country of the brain, some evolved, hard-wired, pattern-recognizing blob of cells we actually needed, back in primeval times. I envision a day when architecture students will travel not to see the European buildings, but the world’s airports. Binney is right. These facilities are the ultimate statements, they are to the student of today what the skyscraper was to our grandparents.
How do we build it? That is the question. How do we bring 30 million people a year, going and coming from every imaginable situation and place, along with their baggage, children, and pets, into a common facility, feed them, load them down with souvenirs, connect them with their suitcases and relatives, and send them on their way? One of my most powerful memories takes me back into an auditorium, where I am seated with the assembled faculty and students of the College of Architecture at my university. I had been on a panel to re-accredit and review the programs in architecture and city planning. One of the outside examiners was a man named Richard McCommons from the American Institute of Architecture in Washington, DC. At this exit interview, McCommons told his audience how to make the step from excellent journeyman to design leader.
“Be problem seekers,” he said; “not problem solvers.”
Nowhere in either Arend’s or Binney’s tomes do I find a word about the interrelationship between airport design and global petroleum use. Jim Starry has found a problem. So far, we’ve not considered it an important one. In all fairness to the industry, however, it is populated by problem seekers of another kind. They are all trying to discover what might go wrong with an airplane, a flight, a takeoff, and a landing.
No industry is as safety conscious as the commercial airlines. In comparison to the airlines, or at least the United States airline companies, the automobile industry is a Paleozoic wilderness. Throughout the mid- to late 1990s, United States automobile accident deaths were relatively stable at around 43,000 per year, down from approximately 55,000 in 1970. By contrast, 1,132 people died in commercial airliner crashes in 1996 globally, with a global estimate of about 850 for 1997 and a death rate of 0.05 people per 100,000,000 passenger miles traveled. Statistically a trip to the grocery store in Denver is more dangerous than one to Cheyenne via DEN’s cancelled flight, regardless of what that man with the tool is about to do to your landing gear. When environmental degradation is thrown into the mix of safety issues, however, we learn more about the human mind as a perceiving machine than about the potential integrity of our bodies.
Like virtually all animals, we evolved our fight-or-flight mechanisms in response to immediate danger. The Federal Aviation Administration is our modern “bear at the cave door” reaction to the drama of an air crash, the near certainty of death in such a crash, the vulnerability we feel 6 miles above the mountains, and the loss of control over our destiny, coupled with the forced trust of people we don’t know, namely a pilot and co-pilot. All these fears are our mental carry-on baggage that we cannot check through to our ultimate destination. So far, we’ve kept the bear away by draconian vigilance which we welcome, ranging from metal detectors, to literal spying by FAA inspectors, to research on flame-retardant seat fabrics. Something deep inside our brains, however, something probably hard wired, tells us that humans do not fly. Although nowadays we do fly, we don’t want to pay the price paid by organisms thrust into strange environments to which they are not adapted through evolution. It remains to be seen whether we can evolve in response to 750,000 tons of pollutants released annually into the atmosphere, another 80,000 tons released into surface waters, another 120,000 tons injected directly into the Earth, or the 142,000 tons dumped out into the ground, by United States industries alone.
Jim Starry would claim, and probably rightfully so, that before too many human generations have passed, over a million tons of carbon monoxide, lead, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, volatile organics, dichloromethane, trichloroethylene, formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, toluene, and “particulate matter” of unspecified composition annually—to name just a few—will constitute a “strange environment to which we are not adapted through evolution.” Thus his 2% runway grade. Just 2%. But 2% multiplied by the number of landings and takeoffs and those 400+ airports now sitting on designers’ drawing tables around the world. Is he way off base? Not really. Not many years ago, an idea, expressed as two words—“unleaded gasoline”—had a rather remarkable effect when put into practice. In 1987 American transportation spewed 4,167 tons of lead into the atmosphere; by 1997 the figure was down to 564 tons, a seven-fold decrease. Of course the switch to unleaded gasoline involved substantial costs, inconveniences, and re-design of motor vehicles. But more importantly, no one complains about unleaded gasoline today. In fact, few if any care about the issue any more. Most important of all, however, is the overlooked “of course,” namely that “unleaded gaso
line” is a simple solution, an idea, expressed in a very few words.
Again, in fairness to the airlines, fuel economy is a major factor in many of the short and long term decisions routinely made by everyone from pilots to company presidents. Given the diversity of atmospheric conditions, airliner fuel consumption between any two points on earth can vary significantly depending on the altitude changes, winds, and weather encountered along the way. Pre-flight planning tries to take these factors into account, as well as the crucially important one: passenger comfort. How many gallons of jet fuel do you spend to prevent the use of one barf bag? How many gallons, beyond the 10% overload required by FAA, to plan for the unexpected change in plans—a sudden storm, a fogged in airport, stacked up traffic, and a few extra circles? It takes about 92,000 pounds of jet fuel to get a Lockheed TriStar from Los Angeles to Honolulu; in this case, “about” is not good enough; a dispatcher who calculates 92,130 pounds is legally responsible for the passengers who have no clue where that figure comes from