Previously, cities developed around convenient river and sea harbors: the location at these logistics hubs was the key to the prosperity of the settlement. Modern key transport points, airports, are taken out of big cities and themselves have become a kind of cities, where there is everything you need for life. The hero of Spielberg's "Terminal" gets stuck in such a "one-day" city and makes a full life there. And this is not a stretch, because the nature of modern business turns the airport, with its hotels, restaurants and other infrastructure, including the planes themselves, into a second (or first?) Home for many active business people. With frequent and long flights, it is already difficult to understand whether you are moving in the world or the world is moving around you, and your plane is stationary.
The new airport from the Grimshaw team, Nordic Office of Architecture and Haptic Architects in Istanbul is not even a separate city, but a self-sufficient universe under its own sky. The single roof, raised far above the inner articulations of the airport, is permeated with artificial and natural light, like a cloudy sky. The openwork lightness of the ceilings, its white and blue color, the pitch and arrangement of the columns make the roof almost weightless. The combination of natural and artificial overhead lighting is reminiscent of the sun, stars and moon, day and night "lighting systems" of the world. The authors of the project suggest that the strict geometry of the ceiling and the identification of key areas with the help of natural light will help passengers not get lost inside the airport, that is, it will be possible to navigate through the artificial sky. This, in combination with the fullness of the ceiling with air conditioning units, complements the aesthetic analogy with the sky with the identity of functions.
A man-made universe has been created on wide open spaces under a single roof-sky: the volumes of functional blocks are similar to cities and mountain ranges, streams of people flow in the valleys, and along the escalator paths you can get to the mountain villages of boutiques and cafes. Trees and electric vehicles add to the sense of a complete world.
The scale of the building creates its own inner horizon line. At the same time, the celestial vaults extend beyond the glass walls of the building, which creates, when viewed from the inside, the feeling of the infinity of the artificial sky. Gradually dissolving in the light, it seems to cover buildings, aircraft and the landscape outside. The relationship between the interior and the environment in this case does not place the airport in the context of the landscape, but rather draws the environment into the context of the airport. It is difficult to understand which of the two skies the planes fly over. The artificial universe of the airport does not seek to dissolve in the environment, but draws the entire surrounding world together with people under its firmament.
This is exactly what we expect from one of the largest airports in the world, which, as planned, will be able to pass through itself first 90 and then 150 million people a year. This assumption is clearly confirmed
Nordic Office of Architecture video: flying over a square of lawn, we see how a speck of rendering gradually spreads over an increasing area, first rendering the airport building, and then rendering the entire area around it in a computer fashion. When it grows to a panorama of the globe from space, all the planes of the world are drawn to the Istanbul airport.
According to the authors of the project, the architecture of the airport is intended to remind of the rich architectural heritage of Istanbul. One of the aspects of this connection is the emphasized superiority of the interior over the exterior of the building. The renders and videos presented ignore the exterior, showing it as a schematic box. You can't see the exterior of the universe, can you ?! Similarly, the exterior of the main architectural structure of the former Constantinople - the Hagia Sophia - is of a service nature: devoid of grace and rich decor, it is more likely to provide an interior space than an external effect, which is reduced only to scale.
Sophia of Constantinople - with its colossal dome and rich interior decoration - is a model of the Universe with its own heavens, and it is not so important how this Universe looks from the outside. It is important that it still amazes us in the same way as our ancestors: "they did not know where we were, in heaven or on earth." On the model of a Christian shrine, the great Turkish architects Sinan and Sedefkar Mehmet-Agha created the Ottoman architectural tradition of religious buildings, which first reproduced Hagia Sophia in a comparable size, and then in a reduced and modified form.
However, if the domes of Hagia Sophia are subordinated to a vertical hierarchy, then at the New Istanbul Airport there are many identical domes, reminiscent of horizontal multiculturalism. The temple connects people with the spiritual sky, and the airport - with the material, therefore the horizontal lapidary sky is quite appropriate in it. It is no coincidence that only two architectural structures appear in the same video: the Sultanahmet Mosque, modeled on Hagia Sophia, and the future airport.
The new Istanbul airport will be located on the Black Sea coast, 35 km from the city center. It is planned to build 6 runways there, and the area of its terminal No. 1 will be about a million square meters, which will make it the world's largest structure of its kind under a single roof. The capacity of the complex will gradually increase from 90 million passengers per year in 2018, when the first stage of construction is completed, to 150 million passengers, when the final, fourth phase is completed.
Equally impressive in scale will be the renovation by Grimshaw (in collaboration with CH2Mhill, Ramboll and ARCADIS) of the Jorge Chavez International Airport in Lima, the capital of Peru. The existing complex will be expanded westward by 700 hectares; among other things, a new terminal and control tower will be built there. An airport renovation concept with a budget of US $ 950 million is scheduled to be published by mid-2015.
