Read Online A Week at the Airport by Alain de Botton - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Alain de Botton
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visitors’ hopes for an architecture that might properly honour the act of arrival. Too few have followed the example set by Jerusalem’s elaborate Jaffa Gate, which once welcomed travellers who had completed the journey to the Holy City across the baked Shephelah plains and through the thief-infested Judean hills. But Terminal 5 wanted to have a go.
In the older terminals at Heathrow, it was a certain sort of carpet that one tended to notice first, swirling green, yellow, brown and orange, around which there hovered associations of vomit, pubs and hospitals. Here, by way of contrast, there were handsome grey composite tiles, bright corridors lined with glasspanels in a calming celadon shade and bathrooms fitted out with gracious sanitary ware and full-length cubicle doors made of heavy timber.
The structure was proposing a new idea of Britain, a country that would be reconciled to technology, that would no longer be in thrall to its past, that would be democratic, tolerant, intelligent, playful and lacking in spite or irony. All this was a simplification, of course: twenty kilometres to the west and north were tidy hamlets and run-down estates that would at once have contravened any of the suggestions encoded in the terminal’s walls and ceilings.
Nevertheless, like Geoffrey Bawa’s Parliament in Colombo or Jørn Utzon’s Opera House in Sydney, Richard Rogers’s Terminal 5 was applying the prerogative of all ambitious architecture to create rather than merely reflect an identity. It hoped to use the hour or so when passengers were within its space – objectively, to have their passports stamped and to recover their luggage – to define what the United Kingdom might one day become, rather than what it too often is.
3 Upon disembarking, after a short walk, arriving passengers entered a hall that tried hard to downplay the full weight of its judicial role. There were no barriers, guns or reinforced booths, merely an illuminated sign overhead and a thin line of granite running across the floor. Power was sure of itself here, confident enough to be restrained and invisible to those privileged, by an accident of birth, to skirt it. Three times a day, a cleaning team came and swept their brooms across the line that marked the divide between the no man’s land of the aircraft on the one side and, on the other, the well-stocked pharmacies, benign mosquitoes, generous library lending policies, sewage plants and pelican crossings available to visitors and residents of Great Britain alike.
With just a single unhappy swipe of the computer, however, all such implicit promises might be prematurely broken. A guard would be called and would lead the unfortunate traveller from the immigration hall to a suite of rooms two storeys below. The children’s playroom seemed especially poignant in its fittings: there was a Brio train, most of the Lego City range, a box of Caran d’Ache pens and, for each new child sequestered there, a box of snacks and plastic animals, his or hers to keep.In the imaginations of certain children in Eritrea or Somalia, England would hence always remain a briefly glimpsed country of Quavers, Jelly Tots and squared cartons of orange juice – a country so rich it could afford to give away small digital alarm clocks, and one whose guards knew how to put wooden train tracks together. Next door, in a barer room in which every word was being captured by a police tape recorder, their parents would experience another side of the nation, as they delineated their unsuccessful applications to an impassive member of the immigration service.
4 Over the course of history, few joyful moments can have unfolded in a baggage-reclaim area, though the one in the terminal was certainly doing its best to keep its users optimistic.
It had high ceilings, flawlessly poured concrete walls and trolleys in abundance. Furthermore, the bags came quite quickly. The company responsible for the conveyor belts, Vanderlande Industries
In the older terminals at Heathrow, it was a certain sort of carpet that one tended to notice first, swirling green, yellow, brown and orange, around which there hovered associations of vomit, pubs and hospitals. Here, by way of contrast, there were handsome grey composite tiles, bright corridors lined with glasspanels in a calming celadon shade and bathrooms fitted out with gracious sanitary ware and full-length cubicle doors made of heavy timber.
The structure was proposing a new idea of Britain, a country that would be reconciled to technology, that would no longer be in thrall to its past, that would be democratic, tolerant, intelligent, playful and lacking in spite or irony. All this was a simplification, of course: twenty kilometres to the west and north were tidy hamlets and run-down estates that would at once have contravened any of the suggestions encoded in the terminal’s walls and ceilings.
Nevertheless, like Geoffrey Bawa’s Parliament in Colombo or Jørn Utzon’s Opera House in Sydney, Richard Rogers’s Terminal 5 was applying the prerogative of all ambitious architecture to create rather than merely reflect an identity. It hoped to use the hour or so when passengers were within its space – objectively, to have their passports stamped and to recover their luggage – to define what the United Kingdom might one day become, rather than what it too often is.
3 Upon disembarking, after a short walk, arriving passengers entered a hall that tried hard to downplay the full weight of its judicial role. There were no barriers, guns or reinforced booths, merely an illuminated sign overhead and a thin line of granite running across the floor. Power was sure of itself here, confident enough to be restrained and invisible to those privileged, by an accident of birth, to skirt it. Three times a day, a cleaning team came and swept their brooms across the line that marked the divide between the no man’s land of the aircraft on the one side and, on the other, the well-stocked pharmacies, benign mosquitoes, generous library lending policies, sewage plants and pelican crossings available to visitors and residents of Great Britain alike.
With just a single unhappy swipe of the computer, however, all such implicit promises might be prematurely broken. A guard would be called and would lead the unfortunate traveller from the immigration hall to a suite of rooms two storeys below. The children’s playroom seemed especially poignant in its fittings: there was a Brio train, most of the Lego City range, a box of Caran d’Ache pens and, for each new child sequestered there, a box of snacks and plastic animals, his or hers to keep.In the imaginations of certain children in Eritrea or Somalia, England would hence always remain a briefly glimpsed country of Quavers, Jelly Tots and squared cartons of orange juice – a country so rich it could afford to give away small digital alarm clocks, and one whose guards knew how to put wooden train tracks together. Next door, in a barer room in which every word was being captured by a police tape recorder, their parents would experience another side of the nation, as they delineated their unsuccessful applications to an impassive member of the immigration service.
4 Over the course of history, few joyful moments can have unfolded in a baggage-reclaim area, though the one in the terminal was certainly doing its best to keep its users optimistic.
It had high ceilings, flawlessly poured concrete walls and trolleys in abundance. Furthermore, the bags came quite quickly. The company responsible for the conveyor belts, Vanderlande Industries
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