The Pan Am Terminal at Idlewild/Kennedy Airport and the Transition from Jet Age to Space Age

Abstract

The aircraft’s “indictment” of architecture continues to the present day, its warping of perceptual space and time having altered our conceptions of global, urban, and architectural environments. Architects, while inspired by the scale and technological intensity of the aircraft, rarely have risen to its challenge, and it is uncommon to find an air terminal that enhances, rather than diminishes, the experience of travel.1 Yet terminal buildings continue to be seen by airlines as opportunities for positioning and branding, since they are the only permanent fixtures on the airport skyline—along with hangars at the edge of an airport—to which their logos are affixed. There is a long history of “flagship” terminal buildings that attempt to crystallize the imagery and experience of a particular airline, and to celebrate the technology and speed of its aircraft. Terminal buildings thus are convenient sources of cultural archeology because the mode of their obsolescence gives us glimpses of the relationships between corporate and popular culture, technology and style, and our vehicles and the cities they inhabit or transgress. Nowhere is this palimpsest of aviation and architecture more suggestive than at New York’s Kennedy Airport, where an “encyclopedic” collection of terminal structures was built between 1955 and 1975. While often successful in achieving a measure of popular acclaim, all of the original terminals have either undergone major reconstruction as the requirements of air travel have changed, or been demolished to make way for a more contemporary intervention. The earliest of these radical transformations occurred at the Pan American terminal, built from 1957–1960, and modified only eight years later from 1968–1973. The original terminal, an elliptical concrete parasol with a crystalline set of passenger spaces beneath, had been an icon of jet-age travel, and was the centerpiece of a larger campaign by the airline to present itself as the most sophisticated and technologically progressive travel company in the world. Yet the changing exigencies of airline operations in the “jumbo jet” era forced Pan Am to replace the terminal with a labyrinthine complex of 1 See, for example, Norman Foster’s paean to the 747 in Ruth Rosenthal and Maggie Toy, Building Sights (London: Academy Editions, 1995).