TWA Flight Center

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The TWA Flight Center is the old Terminal 5 of John F. Kennedy Airport in New York .

The TWA Flight Center, landside
The TWA Flight Center, side view
Interior designed by Raymond Loewy

The terminal, built according to the design by Eero Saarinen for Trans World Airlines (TWA), opened on May 28, 1962. In view of the onset of mass tourism, Saarinen developed the terminal in order to be able to accommodate the increasing number of passengers. Thanks to its procedural disposition and technical equipment, the TWA Flight Center was supposed to ensure fast and smooth passenger handling. The external appearance of the airport hall evokes a large bird with outstretched wings. According to the architect Meinhard von Gerkan , it “looks like a flying dinosaur, wonderful”. Saarinen designed four barrel vaults made of reinforced concrete according to purely formal criteria and without regard to the ideal static load-bearing behavior of the vaults. The building does not correspond in any way to the slender shell structures that engineers like Torroja , Nervi , Candela and Catalano designed at the time to span rooms with a minimum of material. The client intensively marketed the terminal from the first announcement on November 12, 1957. This connection between architecture and marketing, which is common today, was new at the time.

After American Airlines took over TWA in 2001, the terminal was closed due to its operational inadequacy and was only open to the public for a few exhibitions. When the first large jets had to be processed from 1970 at the latest, the departure hall proved to be unsuitable for accommodating the increasing number of passengers. This was finally recognized by the low-cost airline JetBlue , which in 2008 had a new terminal built on the apron of the TWA Flight Center according to plans by the Gensler office. This plan provoked considerable protests because it was feared that the old terminal would be devalued. Nevertheless, the departure gates of the TWA Flight Center had to give way to the new building, while the main building remained standing. Discussions about a takeover by JetBlue ended unsuccessfully. Saarinen's departure hall cannot be reconciled with today's operational requirements of civil aviation.

The TWA Flight Center has been a listed building since 1994 and has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 2005 . In 2012, the terminal was renovated in accordance with monument conservation criteria. Since the closure in 2001, the airport authority has examined various new uses. It was not until 2015 that it became known that Jetblue and a hotel developer were to receive the rights to convert the property. The TWA Hotel opened in May 2019.

literature

  • Kornel Ringli: Winged Myth: Eero Saarinen's TWA Terminal in New York. In NZZ , March 22, 2013. online .
  • Kornel Ringli: Designing TWA. Dissertation. ETH Zurich, 2012. doi : 10.3929 / ethz-a-007343964
  • Kornel Ringli: Designing TWA: Eero Saarinen's airport terminal in New York. .ö Building monograph. published by Park Books , Zurich, 2015, ISBN 978-3-906027-83-8 .

Web links

Commons : TWA Flight Center  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Susanne Beyer and Ulrike Knöfel: SPIEGEL TALK: "Versaute conditions" . In: Der Spiegel . No. 24 , 2013 ( online - June 10, 2013 ).
  2. ↑ Kornel Ringli: Winged Myth. In: nzz.ch . March 22, 2013, accessed October 14, 2018 .
  3. ↑ http://www.beyerblinderbelle.com/projects/24_twa_flight_center_at_jfk_international_airport
  4. ↑ http://www.wsj.com/articles/jet-blue-wants-to-get-into-hotel-business-at-jfks-former-twa-terminal-1429035857
  5. ↑ TWA Hotel. Retrieved February 23, 2019 .

Coordinates: 40 ° 38 ′ 45.2 "  N , 73 ° 46 ′ 39.3"  W.