New Ecologies of Airline Flow

General Articles CLARE LYSTER University of Illinois, Chicago New Ecologies of Airline Flow How can the discipline participate in a city that is increasingly organized by infrastructural work? Architecture’s claim to the infrastructural city is through the design of alternative typologies of space in the flow networks that organize the contemporary metropolis. A total of 60 million people travel by air every month in the US and low cost airline travel in Europe doubled between 2003 and 2004. Deploying air travel as a vehicle for urbanism demonstrates that airline infrastructure is a latent site for new opportunities in architectural research and practice. A New ‘‘New Deal’’ for Architects The promise of the Obama stimulus package is the opportunity to move beyond the legacy of the New Deal era to contemplate alternative models repositioning architecture’s role in the design and execution of infrastructural space. Since highways, waterways and rail corridors are examples of 19th and 20th century infrastructure and the scope of the architect is already well documented and tested in this arena, the discipline might do well to examine other transportation networks such as cargo flow, information flow, e-retail and low cost airline travel as territory for architectural work. President Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s produced many national landmarks including the Hoover Dam, the projects of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Merritt Parkway, all of which have become iconic examples of civic design. More important than their status as infrastructural monuments, these projects exemplify the integration of architecture with infrastructure, for example, the bridges of the Merritt parkway, the pumping stations on the Tennessee River and the iconography of the Hoover Dam demonstrate the deployment of architecture in infrastructure through structure, decoration, and monumentality respectively. These visions still hold up today as models for architecture’s role in largescale public work projects. But architects can pursue alternative models that reposition architecture within infrastructure by piggybacking on the performance logistics of contemporary flow networks, for example, expanding the civic role of utility and 1. Existing and proposed acoustic footprint at O’Hare Airport, Chicago, showing the 65 DNL which is the FAA’s minimum noise level for housing, schools, and cultural programs. Rectangular core zones highlight high impact areas in which these programs still operate. (Vanessa Acobis Ross.) Journal of Architectural Education, pp. 100–111 ª 2010 ACSA New Ecologies of Airline Flow 100 2. Map describing route destinations, distance, and flight frequency out of O’Hare Airport. It reveals that the most popular routes are within a 1.5 h radius of Chicago. The route to Minneapolis is the most popular, with 35 flights per day. (David Stangle.) network infrastructure to generate new forms of urbanism. This essay utilizes air travel and its associated infrastructure as a site for new urban initiatives. While airline transportation was conceived in the 20th century, the massive increase in travel in the last twenty years and the expansion of airline routes, particularly the low-cost airline network in Europe and the United States, suggests that airline travel is an even more significant transportation infrastructure for the 21st century. Yet save a few recent high-profile competition projects for the re-use of abandoned airfields,1 broad-based and conceptual analysis of the airport as an emerging urban organization largely remains outside of architectural practice. The airport will be the true city of the 21st century.2 Re-Think The city of Chicago is spending $18 billion over the next ten years on expanding and upgrading facilities at O’Hare Airport, including a new parallel runway configuration. Future phases of the work include plans for another terminal and a high-speed rail link. The sheer scope of the work—the 2nd largest public works project after the Channel Tunnel—merits a broader conceptual approach to the airfield as a public ecology in the city and region. The O’Hare Modernization Plan (OMP) is a departure point for a graduate research studio at the University of Illinois, Chicago to conceive a series of alternative plans for the airport as a public ecology at the global, regional, and metropolitan scale. Infrastructural Cartography How do you show the Aladdin sign meaningfully in plan, section, and elevation, or show the Golden Slipper on a land-use plan?3 Facilitated by instantaneous access to unlimited data resources, research has emerged as a viable basis for 101 LYSTER design practice over the last ten years. Yet faster downloads and the abundance of online information demand that architects pursue more rigorous and critical interpretation of research data for a disciplinary argument to emerge. Given our training in critical analysis and our ability to coordinate disparate forces during a project, architects are skilled at the simultaneous superimposition and interpolation of multiple layers of information to discover relationships not immediately evident. Architects make good cartographers. As a means to understand how research operates in design practice, I have developed the term Infrastructural Cartography, a graphic process that mines neutral data sets to amplify a specific architectural argument. Not unlike mapping, Infrastructural 3. Map plotting aircraft frequency, take off and arrival time, flight duration and delays at Terminal 3 and Terminal 5, O’Hare Airport, Chicago. (Thomas DeFroy and Daniel Skrobek.) Cartography is the graphic composition and synthesis of analytic data extrapolated into a design proposition.4 In an era where the discipline has undertaken large-scale urban and infrastructural work, Infrastructural Cartography emerges as a suitable technique to reveal patterns between different information sets, program, economics, geography, time and space that uncover spatial possibilities hitherto unimaginable by conventional architectural documentation. In our design studio, we produced a series of graphic time-space diagrams that integrate all situational information of airline flow at O’Hare Airport, Chicago. Ranging from the purely factual to the highly projective, the maps articulate the airport as a diverse ecology through diagrams that analyze and expose the following: acoustic footprint (Figure 1), route density and travel distance (Figure 2), terminal occupancy and flight times (Figure 3), airline stakeholders (Figure 4), ground water pollution (Figure 5) and surface materiality (Figure 6). As the maps develop, factual data gives way to projections, followed by design scenarios that not only embrace problems associated with the development of public space initiatives around airline infrastructure (noise, environmental pollution, delays and distance from downtown to major airfields) but also challenge how we define the infrastructure itself. Infrastructural Cartography demonstrates ways in which mapping can be used productively to illustrate and interpret architectural analysis. By extrapolating and testing pertinent research data it is conceived as a pedagogical technique to generate a wide set of design proposals for complex situations. But Infrastructural Cartography goes beyond the mere graphic presentation of site analysis to construct a series of spatial synergies that, in the studio, shifts the airport paradigm into new conceptual definitions. By recognizing how airline transportation could operate in the contemporary city, Infrastructural Cartography allows us to imagine the airport as a pivotal organism in a larger New Ecologies of Airline Flow 102 urban ecosystem, communicated here as a manual of design effects at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and infrastructure: Thick and Graphic For obvious reasons the airfield of a large airport is a hostile landscape. It struggles with environmental 4. Diagram of airline carriers (stakeholders) at O’Hare. (Thomas DeFroy.) issues such as noise, air quality and deicing procedures that threaten ground water quality. A model for an ecological landscape for the perimeter of O’Hare Airport strategically considers these issues by thickening the existing airfield boundary into a new 1,300-acre park (Figures 7 and 8). While it performs ecological operations, the park is not conceived as a ‘‘green’’ landscape. Since research of the existing airport materials shows that 75 percent of the 7,000-acre airfield’s surface is hardscape, the park is conceived as a synthetic rather than a natural territory with a taxonomy of surfaces for different public programs simultaneously addressing the environmental problems of the airfield (diverting wildlife, treating polluted ground water, and noise). As earth is a natural sound buffer, geometric landforms diminish noise levels and re-use fill from the OMP’s runway expansion program. The resulting graphic landscape of multiple colors and patterns creates an iconographic reading of the park that is legible from the air. The project identifies new motifs for an ecological landscape that are driven by aesthetic as well as performance criteria. De-couple Lower route frequency and higher layover times will follow the airline industry’s future plans for larger planes with higher passenger counts. The current Airbus A380 has a double deck along its entire length and holds 840 passengers. Foreseeing large numbers of passengers stranded in disorienting airport lounges, Vertical Terminal is a new airport typology for downtown Chicago that allows travelers to tour the city between flights. Passengers deplane at O’Hare and arrive downtown via a 10 min high speed shuttle. After check-in at the terminal they receive an electronic tag and hand-held PDA, which provides all the necessary information for a tour of the city that is scheduled to fit their layover time. The terminal is located on the upper floors of a high-rise allowing pivotal views of the city on arrival (Figures 9, 13, and 14). Decoupling the airfield and terminal into separate locations remote from each other allows the terminal to occupy a downtown location and directly interface with the city it serves. Moving check-in facilities away from the airfield is conceivable given the increase of high-speed connections between airports and downtown areas (the high-speed Maglev train from Pudong 103 LYSTER 5. Extent of ground water pollution as a result of deicing procedures at O’Hare Airport. (Catrina Knapczyk.) 6. Diagram of airfield materials at O’Hare Airport. (Catrina Knapczyk.) New Ecologies of Airline Flow 104 7. Site axonometric with new perimeter park at O’ Hare Airport. (Catrina Knapczyk.) 8. Phasing diagrams of new perimeter park at O’ Hare Airport. (Catrina Knapczyk.) 105 LYSTER International Airport to downtown Shanghai travels at 268 mph and takes 8 min). Moreover, augmenting terminal facilities to serve non-travelers that live and work in the city is an attractive model for airlines in difficult economic times. 65+ 9. Vertical terminal. Urban view. (Daniel Skrobek.) The geographical extents of an airfield are significantly enlarged when the acoustic footprint is considered. Noise pollution has been significantly 10. Six rules for Airport Urbanism. (Vanessa Acobis Ross.) New Ecologies of Airline Flow 106 11. New Acoustic Mat at O’Hare Airport. (Vanessa Acobis Ross.) reduced in the last twenty-five years at many world airports due to the advances in aircraft technology, yet at the same time acoustic mapping of O’Hare still demonstrates substantial and dangerous noise levels on the periphery of the airfield. For example, schools and housing lie in core areas above the FAA’s 65 DNL (Day-Night Average Sound Level) sound limit. It is not surprising that the ONCC (O’Hare Noise Compatibility Commission) has spent 435 million dollars since 1996 on noise abatement programs. A new model for urban development that addresses the acoustic impact of airline flow is 12. Axonometric of New Acoustic Mat at O’Hare Airport. (Vanessa Acobis Ross.) 107 LYSTER 13. Vertical terminal. Interior view. (Daniel Skrobek.) proposed for heavily impacted core zones on the periphery of O’Hare. A generic set of rules that address the configuration of the core area, DNL levels, and program distribution inform the design of an inhabited acoustic mat (Figures 10–12) the faceted geometry of which controls sound levels in the same way that acoustics generate distinct models for recording studios and theaters. The proposal opportunistically deploys the negative aspects of air travel as a springboard for a new 14. Diagram explaining the impact of larger airplanes on the airline industry. (Daniel Skrobek.) New Ecologies of Airline Flow 108 15. Time-space-program matrix for a population of 75 million at O’Hare Airport. (Thomas DeFroy.) morphology of space that makes living beside an airport an attractive rather than a negative proposition. Chop Up and Distribute Big airports want to get bigger. C.A.T.A. (Chicago Air Transportation Authority) is an alternative model for airport expansion. Research of flight routes 109 LYSTER shows that 34 percent of flights out of O’Hare are to destinations within a one and a half hour radius of Chicago. The route to Minneapolis is the most common with 35 flights per day. A regional commuter network (Figure 15) distributes airport infrastructure throughout the city producing small air-stations in dense urban areas. Removing a third of flights from O’Hare allows it room to expand without claiming additional land or relocating to a new remote site, which is the current trend for airport expansion in major cities. The airport is thus conceived as a confetti rather than a hub model. Voluntary Quarantine The resident population within a 4.5 mile radius of O’Hare is 461,000. This project proposes a city state 16. New urban airfields. (Philip Medley and David Stangle.) 17. Locations and area footprints of United Airline’s Hub Terminals. (Philip Medley.) for the transitional population of the airport which in the case of O’Hare is 75 million passengers per year. Voluntary Quarantine exploits a social collective that piggybacks the temporality of airline travel and the extreme states of mind it produces; rage, boredom, elation, anticipation, and exhaustion. It is conceived as a pseudo-isolated environmental framework for citizens that find themselves in perpetual limbo, yet reveling in their independence from normal timespace limits. The project proposes an ideal 24-hour program-space matrix (Figure 16) that carefully orchestrates the corporate regimes of the airline carriers that operate in and out of O’Hare with flight times, route frequency and the needs and desires of the traveling public. Like Koolhaas’s ‘‘Exodus,’’ rather than despise the oppression of the airport, citizens take great pleasure in their confinement. Rather than get to their destination they choose to remain in collective isolation somewhere between here and there. Move Out and Re-network United Airlines lost 1 billion dollars in 2008. High energy costs combined with increasing environmental regulations will cause the demise of the air industry. Airports will shrink or close leaving an abundance of vacant real estate in large cities (Figure 17). For example, Pittsburgh Airport is only partially occupied after US Airways reduced its routes from 542 to 68 daily flights since 2001.5 Pittsburgh’s shrinking route map has resulted in the loss of more than 10,000 jobs and the closure of 27 gates in the terminal, 25 percent of its total gate count. The airport was built for $1 billion 14 years ago, largely to the specifications of US Airways. Move Out and Renetwork is a proposal that considers the partial or entire re-use of a functioning airport. Given its large interior area and extensive infrastructural facilities, the airport becomes a center for institutional networks such as commuter universities, prisons and hospitals. Programs that exploit both large-scale interior space as well as New Ecologies of Airline Flow 110 18. Plan grafts depicting re-use strategies for United Airlines’ obsolete terminals at O’Hare, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Denver. (Philip Medley.) easy connections to other locations provide suitable programming options (Figure 18). Endnote While transportation is a primary target in the new stimulus package, there is minimal federal funding sidelined for design research to facilitate alternative ways to rethink infrastructure. Our work is conceived as a think-tank for the infrastructural city. It argues for the optimization of investment in mass transit by endorsing design strategies that conceive more effective use of funding beyond the maintenance and upkeep of aging infrastructure. Moreover, in an era where building might no longer be considered the primary integer of urbanism, Infrastructural Cartography, here characterized as the mapping of airline flow into clear design propositions, is a viable methodology for academia and practice to generate spatial morphologies that anticipate architecture’s stake in the infrastructural city. The studio’s design scenarios for O’Hare combine architectural programming, infrastructural 111 LYSTER engineering and landscape design to stimulate the airport not just as a transportation terminal but as an integrated metropolitan landscape. For too long architecture’s scope in airline infrastructure has been restricted to solving the procedural complexities of airfield master planning and the communication of a carrier’s brand in terminal design. The work here demonstrates that employing a much broader and critical approach to design in airline transportation not only reclaims the airport as a civic infrastructure but also re-defines how it operates as a network in the contemporary city. Acknowledgments I am grateful to the students of Arch 567, Spring 2008 at the University of Illinois at Chicago for their contribution to the studio. Their respect, persistence and hard work produced a memorable semester. Thanks also to my colleagues at UIC for their support and sincere input in discussions of the work. Notes 1. The redesign of abandoned airports facilitates new urban organizations. Recent and popular examples include the Downsview military base in Toronto, which was the subject of an international design competition, won by OMA with Bruce Mau in 2000. Other examples include Stan Allen’s 2008 award-winning proposal for the re-use of a decommissioned airbase in Taichung, a competition for Reyjavik’s Vatnsmyri Airport (2007) won by the British team of Maisse, Dickson, Keane and Ingelby, and OMA’s conceptual proposal for the relocation of Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport into the North Sea so that it could more readily participate and compete in the travel market between Paris and London (1998). 2. J.G. Ballard, ‘‘Airports: The Cities of The Future,’’ Blueprint 142 (1999). 3. Robert Venturi, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972). 4. There are many examples of mapping as a tool for research and communication in the disciplines of art, landscape and architecture, including Venturi and Scott Brown’s diagrams of Las Vegas in Learning from Las Vegas, artist Marco Lombardi’s Narrative Structures, UN Studio’s Deep Planning, MVRDV’s Datascapes and James Corner’s eidetic diagrams. Architecture’s interest in mapping emerged from a move away from ideological approaches to urbanism in the belief that the extrapolation of situational information could generate more suitable proposals for the contemporary city. 5. I’d like to thank my colleague Judith DeJong for sharing with me her knowledge of Pittsburgh Airport.