Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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

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.

In its early years, air travel was a thrill for the rich. Today, it is boring, necessary and commonplace. Through well-written stories and narrative history, this easy read gives a history of air travel from the perspective of the architectural structures that support it. As our understanding of air travel has changed, airport architecture has changed as well. There is now more glass and more security, painfully long passageways, more roadway than runway and, of course, acres of parking. One thing has not changed: the airport has always been a portal to somewhere else. Airports are the waiting rooms of adventure and freedom. Naked Airport gives insight into the challenge of making these waiting rooms less purgatorial.

I share the opinion of the other reviewer who says that the last part of the book is not as strong as the first. For example, there is no discussion of important recent developments such e-ticket kiosks and wireless networks. Even with this shortcoming, I still recommend this one.

As a frequent traveler and architecture aficianado, I have always been fascinated with airports--their structure, symbolism, meaning. This book is an engaging and entertaining look into an often overlooked (but very important) element of our built environment. It reads quickly and and is very enjoyable.

Even for the most expert traveler, the Naked Airport will shed light on many facets of airports domestically and abroad. For instance, did you know that there are over 200 old bank safes in the landfill at Newark (EWR)? The history is layed out cronologically, but woven with social, political, economic and business history, such that it is any interesting narrative rather than a dry recitation of facts.

Fun and informative reading for an aircraft junkie also curious about architecture (I can't be the only one, can I?). Gordon took on a topic that's surprisingly visceral: why do airports, and air travel, make us feel so melancholy -- so harried, so uncomfortable, so nostalgic for an era most of us never knew? It's amusing and touching to see how our forebears tried to manage the Age of Flight -- brave little Greek-columned terminals, with their brisk railroad-depot aura; silly homages to Versailles and its grandeur that could be appreciated only by air; Buck Rogers center-city circular skyports, teetering atop skyscrapers and land-gutting expressways, autogyros and biplanes flittering in all directions; and eventually, in a golden age that Gordon estimates lasted, oh, two weeks or so, the unleashed imagination of Idylwild/JFK, where real architects made real statements and real beauty. Then, of course, dawned the Age of Lead.

Gordon is generous with drawings and photos, and he makes a good effort to draw his subject out of as many airports, in as many countries, as possible. And for my money, he identified the most resonant themes. These include the stubborn difficulty of saying exactly what an airport is (portal to adventure? transit hub? amusement park? a machine for moving people?), a question intimately linked both to changing technology and the cost of flying. After all, if your flimsy Trimotor has to take off into the wind, an airport should be a big grassy circle. If your plane is a limousine for movie stars and rich businessmen, the terminal should look the part: classic lines, intimate waiting rooms, and don't forget lap robes for the fashionable ladies who get chilly at fourteen thousand feet. Maybe it should be a massive seaside terminal, since much of your traffic in those bygone days would have consisted of long-range flying boats. Somehow it also should put your city's name (or your name, if it happens to be Fiorello LaGuardia) up in lights. What should an airport be?

The author certainly won't pretend that the question has been answered. Every modern air traveler's angst testifies to that. Today's airport is built upon aviation's most durable theme: speed, always more speed, but it somehow feels all wrong. Gordon points out that even the earliest air adventurers felt that malaise, how even when you set off in high spirits to visit faraway people and exotic places, often you ended up writing about what you saw around the airport ... and sometimes you didn't even get off the plane. Commercial flight ceased to be a thrill many, many years ago. After a few times aloft, even our flapper forebears found it boring. In that view, today's airports match today's airplanes rather well: They're all an exercise in getting it over with as fast as possible. But somehow we wish it were done more beautifully.

I have my quibbles with the book. The author didn't deal thoroughly enough with aircraft technology. I would have liked to know how airplane interiors changed along with airport architecture, because surely legroom, amenities, and customer service evolved in tandem with the terminal experience. One of his major themes was how the Jet Age divided what came before with what followed. Yes, but I don't think it's inevitable that fast, cheap jets would lead to a dehumanizing travel experience -- or ugly buildings. Nor do I share the author's regrets about deregulation and its lower fares, hub system, and routing flexibility. It's hard to argue that if people would only pay higher fares, and accept government control of where planes flew and how often, travelers would benefit. In that sense I don't think Gordon was willing to face the truth that when something is lost (good architecture, a gracious approach to travel) something also was gained (mobility even for the non-rich, a globe-trotting freedom for the many that history has never seen before). Airport-as-bus-station is not as handsome to look at, but on a blunt level it gets the job done. Form follows function.

This book was published in 2004, and it should have done a much better job of wrestling with 9/11. It's confined to a very unsatisfying "epilogue" when it should have been the climax. Terrorism, after all, is what destroyed the last vestiges of the airport as a public place, a place of pleasant anticipation, of welcome, of innocent adventure. Fear has transformed airport engineering beyond recognition -- and tomorrow's airports will look nothing like the marvels of the '60s or the train depots of the '30s, or even the airports of the late twentieth century. The demands of security will finish the process of making the airport a sealed, insular, lonely, transient place, devoid of greetings or farewells.

This is a fascinating book, full of great stories about the origin of the modern airport. With the history of the airport comes the history of our culture, which makes for exciting reading. The archival details are astounding. The pacing is just right.

However, the book falls far short after it reaches the 1970s. True, there was very little airport construction during the 80s and 90s, but I still got the sense that Gordon tired of the material and just wanted to wrap up the book.

Also, a comment on post-9/11 airport history is relegated to a tacked-on page or two at the end of the book.