The Ur-project for all airports is Eero Saarinen’s glorious design for Dulles International Airport, outside Washington DC, which went into operation from 1962 and is still the shining light. Many other architects have attempted to improve upon Saarinen’s formula of a simple linear shed composed of repetitions of one beautiful extruded section, but without success. Norman Foster has probably come the closest, creating massive global airports for Hong Kong (1998), Beijing (2008) and elsewhere. Foster’s best, however, is still Stansted Airport in Essex, just off the M11 motorway to Cambridge, as a relieving airport for airline travellers who live north of London.
On opening in 1991, Foster’s design was an instant classic, acclaimed as a model of elegance and economy. The tree-like lattice of steel columns and inverted pyramid roof trusses, which provide an even level of top-lighting for the terminal beneath, were designed in conjunction with a supremely talented structural engineer, Peter Rice, then working at Arup. High Tech architecture was from the start dependent on the creative input of brilliant engineers – in his earliest solo projects, Foster usually turned to Anthony Hunt but later he also came to use other experts like Rice.
The servicing systems and public transport connections at Stansted Airport were carefully suppressed within its sunken reinforced-concrete depths, meaning that the passenger facilities – check-in, arrival and departure gates, and shops – could be located instead on a single main concourse level within an uncluttered main shed. It was simplicity personified.
Norman Foster said that his aim was to return the airport experience to the exciting drama of the early days of flight, when people simply walked across a field to climb up into their planes. But while Stansted was clean and simple initially, while usage was still light (about 1 million passengers annually), now that the volume of users has escalated dramatically (some 25 million passengers) it has regrettably become filled up with the usual commercial clutter found in airports, plus extra satellite terminals. Plans to build a second runway at Stansted were abandoned amid general confusion about what best to do with London’s several peripheral airports.
