Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure [Hardcover]

Alastair Gordon (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0805065180 | ISBN-13: 978-0805065183 | Publication Date: September 9, 2004 | Edition: First Edition

The first full cultural history of the ultimate modern structure: the airport, revealed as never before

Since its origins in the muddy fields of flying machines, the airport has arguably become one of the defining institutions of modern life. In Naked Airport, critic Alastair Gordon ranges from global geopolitics to action movies to the daily commute, showing how airports have changed our sense of time, distance, style, and even the way cities are built and business is done.

Gordon introduces the people who shaped this place of sudden transition: pilots like Charles Lindberg, architects like Eero Saarinen, politicians like Fiorello La Guardia, and Hitler, who built Berlin’s Tempelhof as a showcase for Fascist power. He describes the airport’s futuristic contributions, such as credit cards, in the form of fly-now-pay-later schemes, and he charts its shift in popular perception, from glamorous to infuriating. Finally, he analyzes the airport’s function in war and peace—its gatekeeper role controlling immigration, its appeal to revolutionaries since the hijackings of the 1960s, and its new frontline position in the struggle against terror.

Compelling and accessible, Naked Airport is an original history of a long-neglected yet central creation of modern reality and imagination.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

To today's air passenger—patiently removing his or her shoes for the third time that day, swallowing overpriced fast food or slumping on chairs of sadistically molded plastic—the world of travel depicted in Gordon's lively history will feel like a vanished Golden Age. In six chapters and an epilogue, Gordon, contributing editor for House and Garden and Dwell and author of Weekend Utopia, traces the evolution of the airport from the muddy fields of the 1910s to the "sterile concourses" of the '70s with an eclectic range of reference and an eye for detail. By the late '20s, high rollers could tour the capitals of Europe in two luxurious weeks, sunseekers could take flying boats from Miami to Havana in two hours and airports—from Buffalo to Berlin's Tempelhof—reflected widely varied strains of an optimistic and triumphant modernism. Much of this history is contained in the details of abandoned projects, and Gordon's unearthing of such grand schemes as "Toledo Tomorrow" add immeasurably to his narrative. Smoothly blending cultural and aesthetic history, Gordon's book is also helped by its 108 well chosen b&w illustrations and attractive design. Though the term "airport book" has other connotations, reading Gordon's book might just restore a little of air travel's vanished glamour... until the next checkpoint.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Let others savor Humphrey Bogart's steely gaze as he bids farewell to Ingrid Bergman at the end of Casablanca: as a cultural historian, Gordon has eyes only for the airport in which this famous farewell takes place. But the tarmac drama of Bogart and Bergman provides only one small tableau in this panoramic chronicle of the evolution of the airport--from the muddy pastures of the 1920s to the high-tech nerve centers of the twenty-first century. Architects receive their due in these pages--including the nearly invisible, glass-and-concrete "naked airport" design of Munich's Oberwiesenfeld--but Gordon also understands how often politics and economics have displaced the architect in shaping the modern airport. (Hitler successfully turned ugly ideology into the rigid monumentalism of Berlin's Tempelhof Airport.) And, in a sophisticated analysis that anticipates his 9/11 conclusion, Gordon recounts how the terrorist attacks and hijackings of the 1960s and 1970s turned airports into a fiercely contested battle zone. A cultural history linking the Wright Brothers of yesterday with the al-Qaeda cells of today will attract many appreciative readers. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books; First Edition edition (September 9, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805065180
• ISBN-13: 978-0805065183
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #923,312 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Alastair Gordin is an author who likes to explore urban and ex-urban spaces,
especially marginal places like airports, beach houses, hippie houses, and isolation chambers.
I was born in Scotland but have lived most of my life in or near new York City.
I have published several books including Weekend Utopia, Spaced Out, Naked Airport, Beach Houses, Romantic Modernist, Long Island Modern, The Hamptons After Pollock, American Dream, Beaux Arch, Miami:Blueprint of Eden,
I travel extensively and write for different publications including WSJ., the Wall Street Journal Magazine.
My family and I have moved to Miami for the year and we like it here beside the manatees and the iguanas.
I am finishing a book about my father and war and memory--not really about architecture at all -- but many of the same themes run throughout--and the vigelence of viewing.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Airports as the cultural icon of the 20th century, November 8, 2004

By 

Sandra Mills (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure (Hardcover)

Whenever I go through an airport I feel kind of disembodied and try not to think too much about it. I hate the glaring lights, boarding tubes and security scanners. I rush through, buy Toblerone and the crappy magazines that I only ever buy at airports and find a quiet place to wait. But along with all the boredom and humiliation, certain airports like Schiphol and Charles the Gaulle and the old TWA terminal at JFK were an architectural experience that was exciting and compelling.
In "Naked Airport," Gordon does a great job in explaining how the airport came to be the harrowing experience it is now. In a very accesible way he explores all aspects of the airport as a kind of frontier zone for the modern world. The book
is a cultural history in the broadest terms and is written in an easy-going narrative style that weaves together anecdotes, facts and insights about the personalities, architecture, and technology of the airport as well as the
literature, movies, art and pop culture that it has generated. I found it a great fun read from beginning to end.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Naked Airport - Good Book, April 8, 2005

By 

Gregory S. Knoop "Greg" (Silver Spring, MD) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure (Hardcover)

As an Architect, I found Mr. Gordon's book to be a very accessible read. This is not a coffee table book with glossy photographs and difficult to comprehend architectural theory. Instead he gives a very clear overview of the development of the airport building type, much like The Architecture of Diplomacy by Jane Loeffler does. He uses simple and tasteful photographs and graphics pared with a well written history. I would give this book a high mark and recommend it for both architects and non-architect. Thank you, Alastair Gordon for a nicely written book.

Gregory Knoop
Oudens + Knoop Architects

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Airport Reverie, March 15, 2005

By 

John P Bernat (Kingsport, TN USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure (Hardcover)

Alastair Gordon is at his best describing airport construction from the mid-1930s WPA era through the early 1960s. At one point, in fact, he says, "It would be nice to imagine a brief period, a golden moment, somewhere between say 1958 and 1963 ... when advanced technology and American-style marketing produced a perfect, jet-setting age of travel." Instead of devoting energy to a new preservationist movement for airports built during that period (for example, Saarinen's TWA terminal at JFK), Gordon bathes in reverie from this point of the book all the way to the end.

We are doomed to anonymous, repetitive styles in airports, he says, and promptly contradicts this assertion with descriptions of attempts to humanize airports constructed or refitted within the past five years. I can understand him being in love with airports of the late 50s and early 60s, since I am too. But this should not preclude his being fair with the newest efforts to make airports wonderful today. And some of these efforts are really impressive.

Be fair, Alastair! We keep flying; new passenger planes are more comfortable and more efficient (like the 777). Airports are improving, too. Don't lose your sense of wonder and leave your readers dehydrated...the best is yet to come.