Can anyone design a nice airport?
Airports are the lynchpin for our transportation system, however the news is filled with failures at Heathrow and at JFK to name a few. Can they work to make traveling life easier?
The New Yorker just published a good story about airport design with examples of recent successes in Beijing and Madrid. According to the author, Paul Goldberg,
Airports are essentially machines for processing people, airplanes, automobiles, cargo, and luggage—all of which move in different ways, and which need to be connected at certain points and separated by rigid security at others. Just getting all the parts to work together seems overwhelming—indeed, it did overwhelm British Airways last month at Heathrow, outside London, when Terminal 5, an eight-billion-dollar structure that was supposed to transform Heathrow from a congested tangle into a place that would thrill passengers with the joy of air travel, all but shut down on its opening day, when a computerized baggage system malfunctioned.
The rest of the article is a reasoned analysis of what make a good airport beyond architectural grandeur.
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