Cynthia Davidson
“UP AND AWAY AT JFK” WRITTEN BY EDITOR CYNTHIA DAVIDSON, WAS PUBLISHED IN LOG 46, SUMMER 2019.
The TWA Hotel lobby is daylit by large windows and the glazed joints between the soaring vaults that give the building its iconic form. Photo: Patrick Templeton.
Beyer Blinder Belle orders 3.5 million
round mosaic tiles to restore the penny tile surfaces in the terminal, from the floor to walls to seating areas. Photos: the author.
In the TWA Lounge on the 86th floor of One World Trade Center, Eero Saarinen looks out from the cover of a July 2, 1956, issue of Time magazine, a drawing of his disembodied head superimposed over a site plan for the General Motors Technical Center in Michigan. The story goes that Howard Hughes, the reclusive owner of Trans World Airlines, saw the cover and decided that Saarinen should design the airline’s New York terminal. The lounge manager cannot verify this account as fact, but he does point eastward and declare that from this height, one can just make out John F. Kennedy International Airport in the far distance.
As a crow flies, it is 13.22 miles from Lower Manhattan to Saarinen’s TWA Flight Center, recently reborn as the TWA Hotel. The shortest vehicular route from the lounge to the hotel is 16 miles: over the Brooklyn Bridge and across Atlantic Avenue; a one-hour, one-minute ride, or so Google Maps predicts at 5:20 pm on July 1. (The E train to JFK’s AirTrain takes just a bit longer.)
There is something both genius and uncanny in linking the World Trade Center to activity at the airport. The idea was Tyler Morse’s; he is head of MCR/Morse Development, which developed and operates the TWA Hotel. The TWA Lounge, designed to mimic the flight center’s interior, is a Manhattan sales office for booking conferences, events, and weddings at the hotel. It opened two years ago and became a fabulous (small) party space itself. Saarinen’s terminal was closed only a few months after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the original World Trade Center towers. In 2002 it was briefly revived as a set for Catch Me If You Can, starring a suave Leonardo DiCaprio masquerading as a Pan Am pilot and a determined Tom Hanks as an FBI agent. And then it went dark.
How JFK Came into Being
The first New York area airport was in New Jersey, Newark Metropolitan Airport, opening in 1928. LaGuardia was second,
opening in 1939 and siphoning off all of Newark’s passenger business. By 1942, LaGuardia is overwhelmed by demand, and the City of New York begins planning a bigger, international airport to be built on 1,000 acres, which include the Idlewild Golf Course. The New York International Airport, commonly called Idlewild, opens for air traffic in 1948. By 1961, when Dudley Hunt Jr. looks at the ever-evolving airport for Architectural Record, it covers 4,900 acres. He writes: “What is Idlewild?. . . It is master planning on a grand scale. It is an encyclopedia of engineering technology. It is a lexicon of contemporary architecture. Idlewild has a robust vitality. One can easily be caught up in the feel of it; the activity, the big jets, the flags, the fountains, the exotic public address announcements; all are part of it. People are part of it: school children and sightseers; ordinary travelers and world figures; cab drivers and customs inspectors. To these, Idlewild is a vigorous city, a carnival, a world fair, as well as a world airport. Most importantly, perhaps, Idlewild is a vast storehouse of information on the philosophy and practice of architecture in our time.”1
Idlewild is also the site of Saarinen’s first airline terminal commission. In 1961, the TWA Flight Center is well under construction, its four intersecting light concrete vaults a dynamic contrast to the orthogonal glass and steel terminals serving other airlines. Saarinen calls the terminal a dramatic accent: “The challenge of TWA was twofold. One, to create within the complex of Idlewild a building which would be distinctive and memorable . . . which could relate to the surrounding buildings in mass but still assert itself as a dramatic accent. Two, to design a building in which the architecture itself would express the excitement of air travel . . . [and] reveal the terminal, not as a static enclosed place, but as a place of movement and transition.”2 In 1953 the Idlewild planners had decided to allow single unit terminals rather than build one vast terminal to serve every airline. This results, Hunt writes, in “a building group which adheres generally to the master plan, but which is composed of [eight] single buildings without much relationship to each other in massing or appearance. The buildings represent an extreme diversity of opinion on what constitutes a functional air terminal.”3
On the first day of the very month Hunt’s article runs in Record, September, Saarinen suddenly dies in Michigan. He is 51. Kevin Roche, Cesar Pelli, and others in the Saarinen office see the terminal to its completion, and it opens May 28, 1962. Eighteen months later, US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas. On December 20, 1963, Idlewild is officially renamed in his honor.
The Sunken Lounge features a split-flap departures board by Solari di Udine and a view of a restored 1958 Lockheed Constellation plane. Photo: David Mitchell. Courtesy TWA Hotel.
The restored Lockheed Constellation is a museum piece cum bar, grounded on a faux tarmac. Photo: Patrick Templeton. Top: The TWA logo greets visitors arriving at the new hotel. Photo: David Mitchell. Courtesy TWA Hotel.
A Flight Center for the Ages
Regardless of the tale told in the TWA Lounge, it is true that Eero Saarinen and Associates was commissioned in 1956 by TWA president Ralph S. Damon to design a new terminal “for a prominent site on axis with [the airport’s] main entrance road.”4 Saarinen colleague Roger Johnson recalls, “At the time TWA started, commercial jet aircraft was still a thing of the future. They weren’t operational. . . . Eero asked me to do some research on air terminal[s]. I went to a number of libraries and checked out architectural journals. Very slim pickings.”5 In “Airports: Building for the Jet Age,” Susanna Santala looks back at the design:
The advantages of a unit terminal, like TWA, were fast check-in and shorter distances from the entrance to the gates. . . . TWA’s striking structure derives from this singular purpose, and from Saarinen’s careful research into creating efficient pathways from curb to plane. The curving concrete vaults shelter a main lobby with an information desk, a ticket counter, and a large flight information board. Several bars, restaurants, and lounge areas named after TWA destinations were situated on a mezzanine overlooking the lobby. . . .
Ultimately, Saarinen planned everything from the building to its ashtrays, creating a uniform environment with shells, wings, and curves at a multitude of interrelated scales. As such, this micro-world of travelers can be read as Saarinen’s adaptation of the concept of the total work of art to the activities of the jet age.6
Each hotel wing engages with a passenger tube that links Saarinen’s building with Gensler’s JetBlue terminal, which opened in 2014. Photo: Patrick Templeton.
Diagrams showing the transformation of the TWA Flight Center, prepared by Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners LLP. Courtesy the architects.
What the design of the ocean liner was to Le Corbusier in the 1920s, the speed of air travel is to Saarinen in the 1950s. Expressing the excitement of flying in the terminal’s winged form, Saarinen then focuses on the circulation. Passing through the terminal, travelers will barely notice the gentle three-step rises or the slope of the tubes connecting to the boarding areas, each upward motion bringing them to the level of the plane that lifts them off the ground. Saarinen, in 1959:
Having determined the basic form of the building, our next challenge was to carry the same integral character throughout the entire building so that all of the curvatures, all of the spaces, and all of the elements would have one consistent character. As the passenger walked through the sequence of the building, we wanted him to be in a total environment where each part was the consequence of another and all belonged to the same form-world.7
This is not simply the concept of a total work of art; it is also exemplary of architecture’s theory of part to whole.
One part of that whole is baggage. Saarinen develops the first baggage drop-off and baggage claim areas, facilitating departures and arrivals. And he preserves the integrity of the architectural form by designing two passenger tubes to extend from the airside of the flight center to two remote boarding areas he calls flight wings. One tube and flight wing is built for the 1962 opening. No one anticipates demand for the other wing. But the aviation industry is booming. The other flight tube and wing open in 1967; three years later the second wing is doubled in size and extensions added to the north and south sides of the iconic terminal itself. The red-carpeted tubes also become iconic.
The unit terminal has disadvantages. Passengers changing airlines must also change terminals. And an iconic form is difficult to expand. Bigger airplanes, particularly the new 600-passenger Boeing 747, which TWA begins flying in 1970, lead to overcrowding in the sculpted spaces. But the excitement of flying associated with the flight center’s form endures. Until it doesn’t.
In 1990, TWA adds a new baggage handling building alongside the original passenger tube, but in 1992 the company files for bankruptcy protection. As if sensing danger to the flight center’s architectural integrity, even its well-being, in 1994 the City of New York designates the terminal a New York City Landmark. It is only 32 years old, and destined for posterity.
Saarinen’s plastic forms contrast with the acoustically engineered curtain wall of the hotel wings. Photo: Patrick Templeton.
The Wild Blue Yonder
Many factors precede the end of Trans World Airlines, and in 2001, American Airlines acquires the company and the flight center. But in the aftermath of September 11, American vacates the terminal only a few months into 2002. After the DiCaprio film shoot, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates JFK, mothballs the building.
Even before TWA ceases operations, however, the Port Authority reviews options for the flight center’s site as part of a JFK 2000 expansion plan. The proposal removes Saarinen’s two original flight wings to make room for a new terminal for JetBlue. This causes much debate among landmark agencies, which deem any demolition an “adverse effect” under the terms of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. Much back-and-forth finally results in an agreement to fully restore the TWA Flight Center, without its flight wings, and to link the passenger tubes to a new JetBlue terminal, designed by Gensler. The flight center will be landlocked, its view of the airfield cut off but its form intact.
Beyer Blinder Belle, a New York firm known in part for careful restoration work, is hired to “stabilize” the flight center and prepare the Historic American Buildings Survey documents required to nominate the terminal for the National Register of Historic Places. It is listed on both the national and state registers in 2005. In 2007, the Port Authority issues a first Request for Proposals to develop a hotel that incorporates the flight center and retains BBB to prepare restoration plans.
After the third RFP, enter Tyler Morse and MCR/Morse Development. Enter Lubrano Ciavarra Architects. Enter INC Architecture & Design, Stonehill Taylor, and Mathews Nielsen – all designers of one aspect or another of a new 512-room hotel and conference center. Morse signs a 650-page lease with the Port Authority through 2051. JFK handles well over 60 million passengers a year, each one a potential lodger in the future hotel. Morse is aiming for 200 percent occupancy; in other words, booking each room twice within 24 hours.
Design begins in 2014. Anne Marie Lubrano and Lea Ciavarra turn to a trusted architectural concept – figure and ground – to design the guest room wings. They produce two slightly curved, seven-story buildings clad in dark blue glass to act as a backdrop – as a ground – against which the iconic white figure of Saarinen’s building is clearly defined. Each hotel wing attaches to a passenger tube as gently as a jet bridge to a fuselage. Below grade, INC Architecture & Design creates a conference center with a banquet hall and meeting rooms to be roofed with a new “tarmac.” The design and construction require the approvals of 22 agencies. Construction begins December 15, 2017; the hotel’s “soft” opening is May 15, 2019.
The two hotel wings frame the landmarked terminal. Photo: David Mitchell. Courtesy TWA Hotel.
Terminal City
“Perhaps the most difficult part of judging what has been accomplished at Idlewild is the choice of a reasonable position for judgment,” Hunt writes in 1961. “Perhaps a more helpful position . . . would be a sort of reasonable idealism, meaning the kind of idealism of good architects and engineers who strive to do the best work they are capable of, but who realize that there are certain realities involved in getting the job done.”8
Finding a reasonable position from which to judge JFK and the achievement of the TWA Hotel is also difficult. Is it a position on adaptive reuse or restoration? A position on hospitality design? A position on master planning or airport design? Or a position on urbanism? In its daily population JFK is a city unto itself, still the human nexus Hunt described at Idlewild. But its urbanism remains compromised by the original unit terminal plan – separate big buildings, now filled with the faux urbanism of shopping and food courts – and the lack of a hotel the likes of Charles de Gaulle in Paris or Detroit Metro Airport, where hotels are attached to terminals rather than located “nearby.” The hotel piece is now solved, though Saarinen’s tubes connect only with JetBlue. Guests flying with other airlines must take the elevated AirTrain to check in.
As the life of the flight center shows, obsolescence occurs more rapidly at an airport than in a city. Landmarking an air terminal on a site of constant change can be seen as a perversion of progress. Morse’s lease is through 2051, but the future of air travel and how it will evolve over the next 30 years is already being imagined. Today’s long lines at TSA checkpoints and cramped leg room in coach seats have diminished the thrill of flying, but the form that embodied midcentury optimism is saved, even if what was once “a lobby to the world” is now just a hotel lobby.9 The great canted window wall that once overlooked the airfield now looks into the landside of the JetBlue terminal. But to recall the glory days, a restored 1958 Lockheed Constellation prop plane is parked on the “tarmac” between Saarinen’s passenger tubes, its interior retrofitted as a cocktail lounge. Martini anyone?
Cynthia Davidson, editor of Log, recently reread Delirious New York.
Dudley Hunt Jr., “How Idlewild Was Planned for the Jet Age,” Architectural Record (September 1961): 152.
“Saarinen’s TWA Flight Center,” Architectural Record (July 1962): 129.
Hunt, “How Idlewild Was Planned,” 155–56.
Thomas Mellins, “Trans World Airlines Terminal,” in Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future, ed. Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen and Donald Albrecht (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 199.
See Susanna Santala, “Airports: Building for the Jet Age,” in Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future, 302.
Ibid.
“Saarinen’s TWA Flight Center,” 133.
Hunt, “How Idlewild Was Planned,” 156.
Sandy Isenstadt calls the TWA Flight Center “a lobby to the world,” in his essay “Eero Saarinen’s Theater of Form,” in Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future, 107.