One foot inside the new Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport and I can sense it
immediately. What IS it? Something different. Alien. Odd. Can’t quite put my
finger on it. Yes, yes, there are breathtaking Grand Canyons of atriums,
terraced decks laid before you like a cruise liner, a humungous roof soaring
overhead, rooflights leaping like arcs of water. All very magnificent.
Beneath my feet there’s an ocean of elegant tiles, sheened like a millpond,
rather than that ubiquitous, standard-issue BAA carpet, speckled and
multicoloured like monkey puke to, eugh, camouflage every possible hue of
stain. But that’s not quite it. What IS it?
“It’s called, I hope, being treated like a human being,” laughs David
Bartlett, BAA’s head of design at T5, a little nervously. That’s the devil!
Heathrow has been a Third-World experience, pretty gruelling all round. But
Terminal 5? When it opens next March Bartlett can hereby confirm that you
will not, repeat not, be treated like cattle. What, no cramped queue lines
to herd behind? No ceilings so low they scrape your pate? No more shovelling
us through with cattle-prods? No lean-to, Jerry-built sheds dressed in
fag-ash rags like a student hovel? No more of that numbed panic inherent to
airports, a potent cocktail of plane-missing, bag-losing anxiety —
infinitely worsened by 9/11 — and ennui fostered by suspended animation in
these frantic anywherelands? Not even any nonfunctioning revolving doors?
Call this a British airport?
“This is a new airport building for a new age,” says Bartlett (who mostly
talks in mission statements). A caring age. They’ve even put art and pastels
in security to calm the nerves. “And the baggage-handling system — oh,” its
architect, Mike Davis, from Rogers, Stirk, Harbour & Partners pauses,
teary-eyed, as if he’s caught a glimpse of the Sistine Chapel: “A thing of
beauty — awesome.”
Much of an airport’s architecture is hidden from passengers: baggage systems,
all-important security systems, fuel-sup-ply systems, customs systems, the
upstairs/ downstairs of services, the cafés, bars, restaurants, the comings
and goings of staff, the dispensing of discounted Marlboro Lights.
“This building is 90 per cent bowels,” Davis says, “and most of us
will never seem them.Drop your bag at the automatic check-in, and off it
goes to the baggage halls — the size of cathedrals,” he marvels, “to be
stacked by robots in storage pens before being carted off to your gate.”
Just to add to the complexity, Davis has had to disentangle his bowels on a
site the size of a postage stamp — OK, the size of Hyde Park — but
comparatively small, and ruthlessly hemmed in by the rest of Heathrow on one
side and the green belt on the other. “Not an inch to spare,” says Davis.
“We can’t go east, west, north, south, down or up, because of the planes
overhead. When we dug out the foundations we had to get rid of the earth on
site down the trouser leg like The Great Escape . This has been one
hell of a brain ache, like a giant chess game.” And one final little pain in
the neck: a ten-year public inquiry, the longest in British planning
history. “I’ve been working on this thing for 19 years,” Davis sighs,
“better be good, eh?”
The solution was to construct the world’s first skyscraper airport. Most
airports have the freedom to sprawl — it keeps the innards simple if you can
just lay them out flat. Here, though, Davis has had to entwine them through
a stack of levels, “like an immense hamburger”, he adds. The trick has been
keeping that all-important passenger flow one way and the other as simple as
possible. Flying out, you enter and keep to the top floor, before descending
on huge escalators under the tarmac to pop up into two satellite buildings.
Flying in, you emerge on the escalators into the terminal and mostly keep to
the lower level, before dropping into baggage reclaim and then out at ground
level.
But the biggest trick has been to accomplish this technical feat and to
have room at all for any architecture — public spiritedness, space, some
commitment to eco-friendliness. Davis has cloaked the “hamburger” in one of
high-tech architecture’s stock forms — a big tent, delicately skinned, if
bulkily formed, in glass and steel a quarter of a mile (400m) long, held up
with 22 giant tent pegs, joints 48 tonnes apiece, which keep the soaring
roof — the largest single span in Britain — taut with the kind of calming,
appropriately billowing roofspace that you expect overhead in airports but
so rarely experience in Britain’s claustrophobic warrens.
Tent and burger are independentof one another, so that each level gives on to
balconies with views across “canyons” all around the perimeter, crisscrossed
with bridges, escalators and lifts, and on to the Berkshire countryside.
There’s a lovely view of Windsor Castle.
It’s trickier for incoming passengers, who have to bore through the middle of
the immense, fat building. They’ve tried to relieve claustrophobia with
“intuitive” colour schemes and elegant disc lighting, but the lack of
natural light tells. There’s no let-up until you break on to the bridge
spanning the baggage hall, which, running the length of the building and
studded with massive, soaring columns, has a heroism hitherto lacking.
Davis has squeezed every joy possible from so complex a building. As sheer
architecture, though, this overcomplexity means it isn’t up there with the
greats — Eero Saarinen’s TWA terminal at JFK, say, or Wilhelm Lauritzen’s
Copenhagen, Norman Foster’s Stansted — “a seminal moment,” says Davis, “for
generosity of space and simplicity out of complexity” — Renzo Piano’s
Kansai, or even Rogers’s own Madrid Barajas, which won him the Stirling
Prize last October. “It’s invidious to compare the two,” says Davis, but you
can’t help it.
State-funded and less constrained, there was more room, more money for joy
there than here: its roof, where most of an airport’s architecture resides,
is a rippling delight, its multicoloured beams and struts as elegant as the
“ladies’ ankles” that Davis wanted here. That instead Terminal 5’s are
muscular and chunky is due to cost-curbing. The canyons and the pleasant
pedestrian piazza that Davis has fashioned for the front — where the
underground rail and Tube lines and the vast car park and bus garage
converge amid trees and public art — feel rather crammed because they are.
In the best airports — indeed, in Davis’s earliest, more roomy designs for
Terminal 5 — the simplicity still shines through.
“This,” says Davis, “is a very British airport. Not the grand state gesture of
Madrid. Each element of this had to be signed off by 43 stakeholders.
Imagine! 43 stakeholders.”
This is the problemthat Terminal 5 sym-bolises. Where other countries move
heaven and earth to make their modern-day national gateways into marvels, we
hem ours in and, privately funded, keep a sharp eye on the books and any
risk-taking. Terminal 5 has come in on time (give or take that
record-breaking, ten-year public inquiry) and on budget.
This, promises Bartlett, heralds a belated new future for British airports —
Norman Foster is lined up for the replacement for Terminal 2, which closes
next year, Nick Grim-shaw for Stansted’s second terminal — and one which, I
hope, will allow architects just a little more creative freedom, now that
they have proved they can jump through the logistical hoops that Britain’s
accountant culture demands of them. Terminal 5 is as good an airport
building as could have been built in the conditions. Faint praise? No, the
highest. It knocks spots off every other British airport except Stansted.
And no speckled carpet.
Terminal 5 - the vital statistics
Length: 396m; width: 176m; height: 37m
Area: 250 hectares, equivalent to 55 football pitches
Roof span: 165m, the largest single-span structure in the UK, weighing
18,500 tonnes
Handling capacity: 36 million passengers a year
Glass façades: 30,000 m²
Car park: 4,000 spaces
Amount of earth removed: 9 million m³
Total cost: £4.4 billion
A terminal lesson on how to build the big ones
The 5,000 workers putting the finishing touches to Heathrow’s Terminal 5 need
only look north to Wembley for an example of how not to run a major
construction project. Wembley Stadium hosted its first public football match
last month, nearly two years after it was due to open. The collapse of a
roof beam caused early delays, which were then compounded by problems with
sewers, subcontractors and a row with workers.
Multiplex, the construction group behind the project, then blamed the
operators of the stadium. The Rolling Stones were among the casualties, as
planned gigs and football matches were reorganised elsewhere. Terminal 5
started only after the longest-running planning inquiry in British history.
That gave BAA the time to perfect plans and overcome problems.The
construction was aided by the fact that the terminal has only one airline
customer.
Jack Pringle, president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, claims
that most projects that go wrong do so because of the client’s indecision. A
massive building development involves a series of decisions which must be
taken in strict order. Failure to do so causes delays, and delays cause
other delays. “It’s all down to the organisational qualities and the
decisions taken by the client. When clients know what they want, and they
get the right team and take the right decisions at the right time, it all
goes like clockwork.”
He points to the Emirates Stadium built for Arsenal. The club put one director
on the job, and he told the architect and builder exactly what was wanted.
“Decisions have to be taken on a weekly basis. You start messing around and
the whole thing unravels.”
The Millennium Dome is seen as a conspicuous disaster, but Pringle points out
that it was actually completed on time. “With the Dome’s structure, the
client was very clear what it wanted. The project came in on time and to
budget.” The problems arose when the decision had to be taken what to put
inside it. The Government dithered, says Pringle. It approached a specialist
agency for advice, rejected it and then went back to them 18 months later,
by which time it was too late.
Dave Rogers, of the industry bible Construction News, also singles out
the Emirates Stadium against Wembley. “Money is the biggest cause of rows on
construction jobs,” he says. At Wembley, Multiplex, was caught out by the
soaring price of steel, which could not be passed on because it was a fixed
price contract.
By contrast, Terminal 5 was a “cost-plus” contract. “This means everyone gets
paid.” BAA also had plenty of experience in the commissioning and building
of airport terminals, he points out.
JOE BOLGER and MARTIN WALLER
