“La Guardia Airport Is No Longer a Hellscape” reads the headline to architecture critic Justin Davidson’s review of the new Terminal B.
Excerpted from Curbed – New York Magazine:
The global megafirm HOK designed Terminal B to provide an only–in–New York experience, but in a good way. The curved façade turns toward the Manhattan skyline and the afternoon sun. Indoors, artists evoke the city that’s just a traffic jam away. …
So much deliberate New Yorkiness may be a bit lost on the multitudes who will scramble through these halls, aching to get out of town or back to the real thing. But then every big airport addresses two quasi-opposite conditions: the desire to get in, through, and out at a brisk and unbroken step and the need to linger for hours, even entire days or nights, without triggering a psychotic rage. The best terminals are high-efficiency people-processing operations and also pleasant places to read, chat, eat, or listen to music. They are equal parts factory and clubhouse. …
The designers of the new La Guardia have anticipated various forms of travel-related discomfort and tried their best to ease them. Most passers-through will never thank the designers or even notice the analgesics. When you’re hustling for a gate or a cab, you don’t register the absence of sonic assault, the flooring patterns intended to draw you in the right direction and calm you when you’ve arrived, the extra doses of daylight that make you feel like you’re still on Planet Earth, the iridescent wall of tiles indicating the entrance to a restroom. But they’re there. …
Flying is no fun. It hasn’t been for a very long time, and ever since 9/11, it’s only gotten more frustrating. The first commandment of airport design should be Don’t make it worse. In this, HOK succeeds. But La Guardia Gateway Partners, the entity that built and operates the airport on behalf of the Port Authority, goes beyond that to claim that this is a world-class facility — and they’ve even got UNESCO’s Prix Versailles to prove it. …
That a new terminal was built from scratch counts as a New York miracle. That it was inserted in the middle of a frenzied airport that kept wheezing along all through construction is even more improbable. The plan unfolded like a game of pick-up sticks. …
Two footbridges lead from checkpoint to gates, and HOK had to thread them between vertical constraints: The jumbo-est jets had to slip below them, and air-traffic controllers up in the tower had to be able to see over them. Into that channel, the architects placed a pair of long, tilted trusses, their V-shaped columns forming a great steel wave against each wall of glass. An unfamiliar sense of spaciousness made me wonder whether I had been transported out of La Guardia altogether.
Read the full article here.