Foster+Partners - Reinventing the Airport.pdf

Reinventing the Airport

Two global urban scenarios are rapidly unfolding. The first of these is the explosive growth of
cities: by 2030 more than five billion of the ’s predicted eight billion inhabitants are expected
to be living in cities. The second is the shift of balance of growth from the so-called ‘developed’ to
‘developing’ countries.

As an example of what this global shift means parative terms, in 1939 London was the
highest populated city in the world. Ten years later it still shared the big-league with cities such as
Paris, Milan and Moscow. However, at the turn of the new century a demographic map of the world
reveals how the European cities have receded into a mini-league, while the concentrations of
population elsewhere have enlarged and proliferated. This is particularly true on the Asian Pacific
Rim.

One of the implications of this shift is migration around the globe on a very large scale. Airbus, for
example, anticipates that by 2010 only twenty per cent of air travellers will be business
passengers. A key indicator in this respect is the accelerated rate of investment in infrastructure in
the Pacific Rim, particularly in airports, which are being built on a hitherto unparalleled scale.

A further shift can be discerned in the nature of such infrastructure projects. The edges between
infrastructure and architecture are ing more blurred. We can see this in structures
concerned with information transmission — communication towers and platforms, for example. But
we can also see it in structures for munication, such as the airport. Is the airport
infrastructure or is it architecture? Or is it perhaps inhabited infrastructure? As these edges
e less finite, the distinctions between the role of the architect, the engineer, and the other
professions e similarly blurred. New infrastructure projects are typically ing more
publicly accessible, more multifunctional, less unidirectional. Together these trend