Fear of flying. A dash of sexuality. Money. Power. Technology. Mobility. If one kind of building reveals the values and visions of the late 20th Century, surely it is the airport. Airports are so much a part of our everyday experience that it is easy to take them for granted, particularly their design. But it is almost impossible to do that after seeing an exhaustive–and sometimes exhausting–survey that opened Saturday at the Art Institute.
Its title, “Building for Air Travel: Architecture and Design for Commercial Aviation,” hints that the subject is even more ubiquitous than airports, embracing factories and maintenance buildings, as well as airliners and their corporate imagery.
Remember the orange and lavender Braniff jets of the 1960s, with their bright striped interiors and stewardess uniforms by fashion designer Emilio Pucci? They were about the fun of flying, transforming the plane into a billboard and the passenger aisle into a runway–not for planes, but for stewardesses doubling as fashion models. They also generated millions of dollars in free publicity, and later led Braniff to ask artist Alexander Calder to decorate its planes.
Now, more than ever, airports are at the forefront of contemporary consciousness; in Chicago, hardly a week goes by without the mayor and the governor squabbling over O’Hare International Airport.
In booming Asian countries such as Malaysia, glistening new terminals are the horizontal equivalent of the vertical office buildings that declare the arrival of those nations on the world stage. And when a jumbo jet breaks apart in the sky and hundreds of lives are lost, a fate that befell a TWA 747 en route to Paris from New York last summer, we are instantly reminded why the airlines forever are trying to soothe, as well as to impress, their passengers.
The jet age, in short, does not lack for drama. And one of the most dramatic aspects of “Building for Air Travel” is its installation, by Chicago architect Helmut Jahn, whose credits include the acclaimed United Airlines terminal at O’Hare. Hung from a steel beam in the museum’s skylit atrium, a 25-foot-high Airbus rudder is a sign leading viewers to the show and hints at the enormous scale of airplanes and their buildings.
The show itself is in the museum’s horseshoe-shaped architecture gallery, just off the atrium. Jahn has exploited its unusual layout with 46 interconnected, curved aluminum ribs that suggest a fuselage under construction, as well as a time tunnel for nearly 80 years of commercial aviation.
It is a dazzling stage set, with a lightweight frame that makes clear the similarity between the structural skeletons of airplanes and those of skyscrapers. Large cutaway models of celebrated planes, such as the Boeing 314 “flying boat,” hang from the monolithic structure. Appropriately, they are suspended in space instead of being plopped on pedestals. Scores of black and white photographs, as well as original drawings, form a kind of modernist collage between the ribs.
Near the end of the horseshoe, the frame becomes more complete, with a roof, windows, even an overhead luggage compartment. Two rows of airline seats allow viewers to sit and watch videos about the airline industry’s past and future.
If it sounds as though the Art Institute has temporarily turned itself into Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry or the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., then think again. The show, curated by the museum’s John Zukowsky, does not ignore technical aspects, but its primary focus unmistakably is design, and how architects, industrial and graphic designers have joined forces to remake a sizable chunk of the world in which we live.
Early airports resembled Beaux-Arts or Art Deco railroad terminals, a reassuring image that applied to streamlined airplane interiors by the likes of Depression-era designer Norman Bel Geddes. A Chicago-to-San Francisco 12-seater was known as a “flying Pullman.” Similarly, factories and maintenance buildings looked like railroad repair sheds. The need for reassurance was real–so real, we see in a photograph, that the first stewardess was a registered nurse who wore a white hat while pouring coffee from a silver pot.
World War II changed everything, bulking up military aircraft and factories, which were converted to commercial use after the war. Anyone who has flown in a packed 737 will be astonished by the roominess of the Boeing 377 Stratocruiser (originally a C-97 military transport), especially as conveyed by the drawings of industrial designer Walter Dorwin Teague. The planes featured overhead compartments, not for luggage but for sleeping berths, as well as chic, lower-deck lounges.
Their spaciousness was echoed in the flowing spaces of modern, steel-and-glass terminals, such as C.F. Murphy Associates’ O’Hare, or the vast, cantilevered spans of maintenance hangars, like the one architect-engineer Myron Goldsmith designed for United in San Francisco. With its steel reaching out 142 feet from central supports, the hangar was large enough to house four DC-8s.
Such links emerge clearly in the show’s wall text, but discerning them from the mass of photos is often a daunting task. In places, the walls are crammed with material, as if the museum had sought to evoke a crowded airline interior where you and your neighbor jostle for armrest space.
The overload provides little relief or time to assimilate the images’ meaning. It also prevents the museum from displaying several photos of key examples, such as Eero Saarinen’s landmark, bird-shaped TWA Terminal in New York. And it may lead weary viewers to bypass fascinating, albeit jarring finds, like a photo of Frankfurt terminals remodeled by Albert Speer, son of Hitler’s architect.
But for the dogged observer, or one who simply wants to pick and choose images, the show is richly rewarding. Even if Zukowsky could have done better editing it down, he is to be commended for assembling and incisively interpreting the vast trove of material.
Moving through the time tunnel, we learn how noted architects did logos for the likes of Lufthansa and Pan Am (the former’s stylized crane dates to 1918; the latter’s light-blue globe was co-designed by New York architect Edward Larrabee Barnes in 1955). We see the impact of the ’60s jumbo jets, whose interiors are more like huge buses than trains. There is ’70s kitsch, including ladies in hot pants and boots in a 747 lounge, as well as ’80s postmodernism, which led to such quirky, regional expressions as Nantucket’s Shingle Style control tower.
Finally, we arrive at aviation design of the present and future. And, with the exception of American airports that resemble shopping malls, it is as startling as the first planes must have seemed. A model shows a massive European factory to which the parts of planes are flown in and assembled. There are conceptual designs for 800-seat, double-deck planes, complete with sleeping quarters for the crew, plus health clubs and conference centers.
So we’ve traveled, in a sense, full circle to the roomy planes with which the show began. If we’re weary, we can sit in those airline seats and take in the videos, including one in which actors appear to move through a computer-generated version of Jahn’s breathtakingly transparent airport office and retail center in Munich. With luck, no one will nudge our elbows while we watch.
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“Building for Air Travel” appears through Jan. 5 in the Art Institute’s Kisho Kurokawa Gallery of Architecture (Gallery 227).
