2004 Urban Design
Urban Terminals

Within the context of today’s ever-expanding globalized economy—emerging from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries’ unremitting spread of capitalism—the typologies of the intermodal terminal and the airport (urban terminals) can be considered accurate barometers of the built products and urban spaces associated with such a condition. Taken as broader indicators, these typologies represent both an organizational and conceptual approach to urbanism (if not also a physical one) that is proliferating from Alliance, Texas to Singapore and Rotterdam, and thus offer a fertile milieu in which to study contemporary patterns or urban growth. Thus, the premise of this study argues that within the airport and the intermodal terminal, the complex interactions between infrastructure, technology, and contemporary urban space are intensified and exaggerated producing what may initially appear to be anomalous states or manifestations, but ones that can be elucidated, in turn offering an alternative reading of the urban within both developed and developing conurbations.

It has been widely suggested that typologies such as the airport and the intermodal terminal have demonstrated a more than ambivalent relationship with their affiliated municipalities. In some cases, the accumulation of programs such as offices, banks, hotels, restaurants, conference centers, casinos, museums, retail shops, and entertainment complexes within and at the periphery of these terminals has produced enclaves that, in the case of the international hub airport, are actually beginning to compete with the city they were originally intended to serve. [1] If this trend is read as a broader indicator, one could argue the accumulation of disparate programs around these nodes suggests that these terminals’ primary affiliation is no longer with their adjacent municipalities—where these services would expectedly be available—but rather with a larger rhizomatic network whose affiliated nodes are not regional city centers, but global economic and logistic enclaves. The organizational structure of these terminals demonstrates “relationships between distributed sites that are disconnected materially, but which remotely affect each other—sites that are involved, not with fusion or holism, but with adjustment.” [2]

Stan Allen has argued that the “prototypical cities of the late twentieth century are distinguished by horizontal extensions,” producing dispersed moments of thickening and intensification. [3] One could argue that these urban terminals are the most direct evidence of such thickening. The airport and intermodal terminal are distinguished by intensified moments of experience—the intensification of the flow of capital, the intensification of a population, the intensification of goods moving through a segment of the market, and/or the intensification of traffic moving through a single geographic position.

The proposed research for this fellowship involved the study of these terminals, their explosive growth and their effects on the traditional urban formations and municipalities they were initially deployed to serve.

Notes

[1] See Hans Ibelings, Supermodernism: Architecture in the Age of Globalization (Rotterdam: NAi, 1998); Ken Friedman, “Restructuring the City: Thoughts on Urban Patterns in the Information Society” (Den Oppna Staden Conference, The Swedish Institute for Future Studies, Stockholm, 1996); Carlo Ezechieli, “Shifting Boundaries: Territories, Networks and Cities,” NETCOM 12, no. 1 (1998): 35–50.

[2] Keller Easterling, “Interchange and Container: The New Orgman,” Perspecta 30 (1999): 113–21.

[3] Stan Allen, “Field Conditions,” Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 98.