Airports/Cafes and Storage
Space
Reading
• Read chapter 8 in How Cities Work and
figure out what the author says about the
loss of community in the digital age: what
has contributed to it. What is community
as commodity in his mind and how do we
combat it.
• Also research articles about The
Starbucks Effect and determine what
effect if any has Starbucks had on the built
environment.
The electronic revolution
• The digital world has not only changed our sense of speed but it has also
created in us a new understanding of spatial need.
• Whereas before it may have been the library or the office or the department
store that held our attention, today it is places like the home or the café or
the airport that do so.
Old spatial reliance
• Before the electronic revolution, bodily encounter with space was needed to
accomplish daily requirements.
• The built environment of streets, sidewalks, and buildings was critical in
accomplishing those ends.
The impact of the electronic medium
• With the electronic medium our
reliance on space, urban or
otherwise, has at least been
contracted if not totally made
obsolete.
• Today we can buy a shoe,
accomplish work-related tasks
and date on the internet.
• We may have to access space
to have a haircut but we don’t
have to do the same for many
other tasks.
The rise of new typologies
• As old typologies such as
the office, the shop and
the library subsided, or
are on their way towards
that end, new typologies
emerged in their place
• The airport as shopping
center
• The café as office
• The office as storage
center
• Storage space as
shopping center
The Airport
• Even as the computer has allowed us to access the world through the tip of
our fingers and thus not move, it has also given us incentive to travel
• The Internet has come a long way since its development in 1995. In less
than 15 years, the percentage of Americans who use online has increased
from 14 percent to 79 percent and use of the Internet crosses all
demographics
Airport as edge: Living on the edge
• Much like the way doing work on the computer is like
being on the edge between two places, so is the airport.
• The physical reality of doing work on the screen has been
places like airports, places that are transitional by nature.
Suspended between
two worlds: The
Terminal
• The movie the terminal
expresses this sense of
suspension between two
places.
• It stems from the perception
that we have come to live in
transitional places.
• The main character is a person
from a country whose
government has collapsed
while enroot to the US.
• He cannot proceed and so has
to remain suspended in the
airport.
The airport as shopping center
• In the movie we see a commentary being made about how
airports have become more than places to catch a flight, they
have turned into shopping malls.
• The idea here is that they have come to resemble our
downtowns and our built environment in the heart of the city.
Airport as dating center
• Rather than our old reliance on urban functions for finding a
partner, today we access that need on the run, in transitional
areas.
• In this sense we have become the globalized hybrid species
like no other melting pot has allowed: we meet in airports and
not in neighborhoods.
Airports as places of employment
• The surge in people moving about has found resulted
in the need for new airports or additions to airports.
This has been a boon to construction industry.
• Rather than urban buildings alone, now airports offer
access to creativity.
Airport as home
• In the movie the airport becomes home to the main character.
• This serves as a commentary as to the new industry of lodging
that has opened up next to airports.
• There is no reason to experience the city, all necessary
functions of life can be had within the proximity of the hotel.
Airport hotels
Airport as cultural center and resort
Airport as a center broadcasting
national and cultural identity
Doha airport, Qatar
A sign of cultural progress/openess
Jedda airport, Saudi Arabia
Dubai airport, UAE
The café
• Of course cafes have always been popular social spaces, especially in
Europe and the Middle East.
• But in the age of electronics they have come to replace the office, the library,
and even the school.
• Here individuals can be found writing reports, doing research and talking to
a professor-all through the internet.
Socializing work through The café’
• The recent surge in café design has not been in reply to a sudden increase
in the desire for lattes, but to a response to the need to soften the burden of
work required to get ahead in life.
• Since it is not the latte that is of primary importance but the space of society,
the interior of the café has to work hard in lending the person in it an
amplification of that effect.
The Starbucks effect
• What is important is that when you get to the café there needs to be a sense
of the society involved even if there are no people around.
Starbucks thrives on difference
• Even though the original Starbucks store evolved out of urban principles
where sidewalk life is bustling with activity, today’s Starbucks is likely to be
found in a mall and immediately next to a large parking lot.
Storage Space
• Just as the internet has displaced the importance of the street and the office,
so it has displaced the shop.
• Of course cities continue to see proliferation of shops in malls and
sometimes in the streets, but today the shop is largely there as a form of
advertisement.
Shop-Warehouse relationship
• High fashion stores like Prada have well understood the
modern shopper and how he or she will ultimately shop online.
• The real shop becomes an opportunity for putting the product
on show, like a theatrical act.
Sanaa architects and the
theatrical
Shop as the space for communal
exchange etc.
• In an outfit such as Pottery Barn, real space
becomes an opportunity for connecting with the
community and advancing, in this case, lessons in
interior design.
Shopping in the storage warehouse
• The marginalization of real spaces has led to a new kind of
shopping; shopping in what traditionally had been considered
warehouse storage space.
• Stores such as Costco, home depot and of course Wal-Mart
attest to that.
The Seattle Library as a kind of
warehouse
• In designing the Seattle library, Rem Koolhaas, the architect, did not
generate his concepts from the function of the library but from the future
event when the library as an institution of knowledge is made obsolete and
we can access any text from the screen in front of us.
The Exterior Shell of the Library
• Having reduced the library to a storage where the only important question is
the shell, Koolhaas made this part of the building the primary source of
design.
• Everything about this component of the building is to the effect of innovationthe structural expression of the net (using the internet as a metaphor) the
shape of the volumes, glass color.
The interior of the Library