A Cure for Terminal Decline

Wall Street Journal, Commentary, 8/22/01

OOne would have thought that admirers of Eero Saarinen's TWA Flight Center at John F. Kennedy International Airport would be pleased that it is to be preserved as part of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey's $10 billion airport expansion. But no, the current proposal has preservationists in a tizzy.

Both the Municipal Arts Society and the National Trust for Historic Preservation have voiced their opposition to the City Landmarks Preservation Commission. The problem, as they see it, is that the striking concrete building, which opened in 1962, will be partially surrounded by new construction, and rather than functioning as a terminal, it will be relegated to a secondary role -- a conference center, restaurant, or flight museum.

Of course, changing contexts have always been a part of urban architecture, and a metropolitan airport resembles nothing as much as a not-so-small city. The new terminal, set back some distance from TWA, is a large, low semicircular building, gingerly linked to it by two tubular walkways that were a part of the original building. It is a polite -- perhaps, too polite -- solution that emphasizes the older building's sculpture-like quality.

A more adventurous architect might have folded the swooping curvilinear form into the new terminal, although this would have required significant alterations to Saarinen's design. Either way, the TWA terminal -- which, unlike his Dulles Airport, was not designed to be enlarged -- will be changed.

The insistence that the architectural integrity of an important work can be preserved only by continuing to use it as originally intended is odd, given the long list of landmark buildings that have been functionally transformed. Louis Sullivan's masterpiece, the Auditorium Building in Chicago, was a commercial complex that included a hotel and offices as well as a theater. Today it serves as a university.

Also in Chicago, John Wellborn Burnham's and Daniel Root's 1891 precursor of the modern skyscraper, the Reliance office building, was recently converted into a hotel, as was the first International Style high-rise in the U.S., George Howe's and William Lescaze's PSFS bank headquarters in Philadelphia.

The truth is that good buildings have many lives, which is part of their appeal. We discard old forms of dress, and speech, and behavior, according to changing fashions, but old buildings represent a living link to the past even as they continue to be useful in the present. An old machine -- a steam locomotive, say -- is at best a curiosity, but while rolling-stock changes, old railroad stations continue to serve as transportation hubs -- and as museums (the Musée d'Orsay in Paris), shopping malls (Washington's Union Station) and convention halls (Philadelphia's Reading Terminal).

Are such converted buildings different from what they were? Do they tamper with the original architect's intentions? Absolutely; looking at art in the Musée d'Orsay is an experience quite unlike waiting for a train at the erstwhile Gare d'Orsay. But the building continues to serve, and its pompous Victorian architecture continues to impress.

The notion that architectural form is inexorably linked to function is, of course, a modern one. The aphorism "Form follows function" is attributed to Louis Sullivan. Whatever Sullivan actually meant -- he was, after all, a master of decorative art -- his dictum became the cornerstone of severely functionalistic modern architecture. "A house is a machine for living in," taught Le Corbusier. Henceforth, buildings would be designed like locomotives -- efficient, purposeful, functional. The corollary, which critics of the proposed TWA transformation echo, is that the architect's intentions are compromised if the building's function is changed.

Oddly enough, Saarinen, who died in 1961, was one of the first modern architects to question the "form = function" formula. His buildings were often fanciful and reflected a view of architecture that was romantic rather than functionally deterministic. He built colleges at Yale that recalled Italian hill towns, a headquarters for the John Deere Company that conjured up the image of rusting farm equipment, and a great gateway arch for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis.

Saarinen's buildings are powerful icons. His granite skyscraper in Manhattan for CBS is a dark brooding presence that was nicknamed Black Rock; the Ingalls Hockey Rink at Yale looks like an up-ended Viking ship. The gull-winged roof of the TWA terminal reminds many of a bird, although Saarinen always maintained that it was merely an abstract depiction of flight. The Buck Rogers interiors recall a time when airports were glamorous places with high-end restaurants peopled by well-dressed travelers sipping cocktails while they waited, languidly, to take off into the stratosphere.

Of course, lost luggage, flight delays, uncomfortable seats, bad food, and diminishing services long ago wrecked this romantic image. Resignation, rather than excitement, characterizes modern plane travel. But as we schlep our bags through the new Kennedy terminal it will be nice to glance over at Saarinen's concrete bird -- whatever its function -- and be reminded of the upbeat vision of an earlier time.

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