As JFK Airport looks to expand to meet its ever-increasing demand, history has a way of getting in the way. Jet Blue constructed its new Terminal 5 behind Eero Saarinen’s TWA Flight Center, and plans to use the landmarked building have been in limbo for the past few years. Now that Jet Blue is expanded again, it has its sights set on I.M. Pei’s understated Terminal 6 building next door.
Today, at City Room, David Dunlap reports that the Port Authority will be tearing down Terminal 6 as Jet Blue builds out Terminal 5. The “crisp island of aesthetic tranquility” will be no more. In the piece, Dunlap speaks with Henry Cobb, an architect who worked with Pei on the original design, and Cobb is sad to see the terminal go. “This is not pure greed,” he said. “This is the myopic view of engineers. They just can’t figure out how to reuse it and they don’t put enough value on it to figure out how to reuse it.”
It is the last line of Dunlap’s piece that truly resonates. “Serenity, generosity, clarity, spaciousness, simplicity and dignity” — all used to describe the terminal — “aren’t words that describe jet travel today.” Monstrosity replaces subtlety, and history is bulldozed away. We’ve seen it as the Archer Ave. stations replaced an elevated train, and we’ll see it again and again and again. That’s how New York City grows.
18 comments
The problem isn’t just due to the “myopic view of engineers”, but one of cost and practicality. I’m not too familiar with this terminal, but I do know that building codes have evolved quite a bit since the terminal was originally built. Asbestos is out. Accommodations for the disabled are in. Energy efficiency is a requirement. So are a myriad of fire-rated emergency egress passageways. I would venture to bet that the existing structure was deficient in all of these aspects, and to to make them code compliant would be extremely extensive and time-consuming.
I really do hate to see iconic old buildings die, but as we’ve generally argued in conversations about the WTC-PATH station (among others), unique asthetics shouldn’t always justify exorbitant costs.
Well said, but I find a bigger crime to be over-priced ugliness in the doctrinaire quest for the “right” aesthetic. Ornamentation isn’t usually expensive to the tune of tens or hundreds or thousands of millions of dollars over budget, but building a brutalist superblock, as was done in the 1970s, or a giant porcupine is.
It is so ironic that the iconic Pan American Worldport (Terminal 3) is being featured prominently in the new TV Show “Pan Am”. Yet it, lacking any landmark protection unlike the TWA Flight Center (original Terminal 5), is also slated for demolition…by Delta. And I still lament the destruction of the world’s largest stained glass window by American Airlines at the former terminal 8.
If anyone catches the old movie “Come Fly with Me” on TCM, its opening credits feature a filmed tour of “Terminal City”, (in vivid color) at what was then called “New York International Airport”.
What a time to fly!
It’s a good thing that it’s slated for demolition. The terminal is unusable, requiring passengers to walk on the ramps outside the terminal sometimes.
I don’t miss the TWA terminal, and I’m sorry that it has landmark status.
I remember it from when US Air was using it. It was full of steps, and full of decorative features which impeded functionality. And the introduction of airline security made the traffic flow god-awful. Oh, and it had pigeons.
In the restaurant.
Considering that it was designed by Pei, it’s probably too structurally defiant to save (see: National Gallery East Wing, Hancock Tower).
Design wise, I don’t see how something that came from the mind of the man who designed City Hall Plaza in Boston, considered by many to be *the* worst public space in the world, could be worth saving.
*deficient
Oh, thanks for reminding me. That relates to my comment above. Click here for some pics of what nbluth is talking about in Boston. The page is pretty badly designed too <g>, but the pictures enlarge if you click them.
Pei really has all the imagination you’d expect from somebody living under some reactionary legacy to authoritarian Marxism (whether capitalist or not).
I think the Boston city hall is an awesome building… I used to lovvvve walking by it when I lived in Boston. From street level, it’s totally cool, it’s like a giant modern castle, with a sort of brooding, primal, overwhelming presence that you just don’t see in more average buildings. It’s a building you can feel, in your bones…
[Another building with that sense: Yokohama’s “Landmark Tower”; it’s hard to see this from most pics, but it has a crazy-impressive presence from ground-level (and it’s not the height, it’s the shape, which both dramatically magnifies the effect of height and scale, and even echoes some of the forms of traditional castles).]
In general I don’t get all the whining about “brutalism.” Yes, there are lots of ugly and banal buildings built in that name, but there are ugly and banal buildings in every style. Attempts to brand certain styles as inherently bad seem misguided—it’s rarely particular styles that are bad, it’s usually the execution… While some styles are more forgiving than others, a sucky architect is sucky, no matter what style he works in, but a good architect can often work wonders with anything.
Yeah, you can feel it in your bones, but do you really want to feel your eyeballs being raped by a Phillips head in your bones? :-\
In all fairness, I may find brutalism to be an ugly style in general, but a particular problem with modernists (of all stripes?) is their obsession with being out of scale. That’s true of Le Corbusier and his knockoffs too. Boston’s city hall looks more like a Soviet era-prison complex than a building for public administration. Even developments like Stuyvesant Town don’t really have inherently ugly components: fairly plain brick facades that look more meh than ugly, park space, maybe a bit more height than is appropriate in the neighborhood. But they totally broke the flow of the street grid and they made the complex generally unpleasant to walk through, not to mention uninteresting. And, when they lose the security presence they need by default, they end up dealing with more crime, unsurprisingly.
Or, even worse, check out this ocular assault (wiki article: Woodhull Medical…). I’m not sure if it’s brutalism or not, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything so hideous – it seems almost malicious to inflict something this horrible on a neighborhood.
Wait, a subway replaced an elevated train, and that’s an aesthetic LOSS?! I mean, the Archer Ave stations suck, but that’s because they’re not maintained. They don’t suck any more than the elevated stations on the J. And they don’t blight the street like the elevated J does on Broadway.
My issue with the Archer line is it doesn’t go as far as the el did. Could’ve at least gotten it to Merrick Boulevard.
Well the original plans were to send the E to southeast Queens. It wasn’t supposed to end at Jamaica Center. That’s the bad part of building revenue service in phases. Sure, funding comes through and service starts but often times it ends up coming short. Like the F via 63rd St which was supposed to be a super-express via LIRR tracks to eastern Queens, the Archer Ave extension, and in the future, SAS only seeing phase 1 (maybe 2) complete.
Meh. I don’t get all the el hate. I think NYC would lose a lot of character if the els were lost.
Me too man, me too. Imagine how many more transit options this city would still have if those els weren’t torn down decades ago.
While you’re at it, imagine if the streetcars had continued to cross the Brooklyn bridge…
I’ve flown through Terminal 6 before a few times. It wasn’t big enough to handle the traffic that went through it (JetBlue’s terminal earlier this decade). It had few security lanes through two bridges from the check-in building to the terminal. There was an attempt to provide food services through Dunkin Donuts setting up coffee dispensers on ramps, windowsills, etc.
It’s no longer functional in today’s climate of air travel. Many may hate to see it go, but it’s JFK and functionality has to come into play. And since it’s an expansion of Terminal 5, it doesn’t make sense to keep the check-in building in place alone like they did at Terminal 5.
All in all, as far as modern flying goes now with increased security and building codes, as mentioned above, its time has come.
I seriously cannot understand how anyone laments the probable passing of this ugly glass-and-concrete box. It’s not the worst glass-and-concrete box in the world, but anyone who sees that building and thinks “Serenity, generosity, clarity, spaciousness, simplicity and dignity” is either seriously deficient in taste or, in the case of most people who read the Times and spout such nonsense, purposely claiming to find beauty that others (honest people, that is) cannot see as an elaborate means of signaling their superior taste. Praising obvious crap as genius has ruined “high” art since WWI as well as architecture and a lot of literature since WWII. Can’t this end or have you all really embraced the BS so long that you’ve actually come to believe it?