Plans to Redesign LAX: Architecture and Anxiety

If you want to peer into the future of post-Sept. 11 America, few projects offer a better lens than the recently unveiled plan for a $9.6-billion renovation of Los Angeles International Airport.

Designed by Landrum & Brown, a Los Angeles firm that specializes in airport design, the plan has been touted by Mayor James K. Hahn as a safer, more efficient transportation hub for the new century. It would require the demolition of four terminals and the removal of all existing parking structures. New parking and ground transportation centers would be located two miles to the east and linked to the new terminals via an elevated train.

The most controversial part of the plan has been its aim to limit the airport’s capacity to 78 million passengers a year, essentially by eliminating 11 existing gates. The move would force other regional airports to undergo major expansions to accommodate expected growth in air travel over the next decade.

But the proposal’s other focus is security. By stretching out the flow of movement through the airport, it seeks to relieve congestion and increase screening and surveillance options. Relocating parking, city officials say, will also reduce the threat of car bombings.

The new airport is still in the early stages of being designed, and it has yet to attain approval from the Airport Commission, City Council and the Federal Aviation Administration. It would be financed through a combination of increased landing fees for airlines, federal transportation funds, local bonds and a $1.50 surcharge on passenger tickets. If approved, planners expect to finish the master plan by December, with groundbreaking scheduled for 2004 and completion in 2012.

The plan is not without merit. In its desire to link the airport to a broader transportation network, it reflects the region’s sprawling character. And its emphasis on security in the wake of Sept. 11 is understandable.

Yet the plan also signals a significant shift in how we view the public realm. It sacrifices freedom of mobility for the illusion of invulnerability and the demands of continual surveillance. As such, it represents a new architecture of fear.

Completed in 1961, the structures that make up LAX do not rise to the level of great architecture. Nonetheless, their layout is a model of efficiency and a celebration of L.A.’s car-culture ethos. Dominated by a horseshoe-shaped roadway, the airport terminals wrap around a series of central, multilevel, concrete parking structures.

The layout allows passengers to sweep right up to the terminals in their cars. And although the airport is functioning at 50% over intended capacity, it retains the charm of its subtropical, suburban context. It can still be a short, pleasant walk from parking to the terminals, even if once inside the spaces are cramped and mundane.

The new design would radically reconfigure that experience. Most travelers would leave their cars at one of the two off-site entry points--essentially parking structures. From there, they would board an elevated train to one of four new terminals that would replace existing parking and then cross the ring road on enclosed bridges to the gates.

The result would transform the airport into a sequence of closely monitored checkpoints. The parking areas, for example, would focus on screening cars for bombs and “passive security,” such as using surveillance cameras to spot known terrorists. “Active security”--bag screening, metal detectors and explosive detection--would take place at the main, centralized terminals. Additional screening would occur at the gates.

On a more practical level, the plan calls for the demolition of many of the existing gate concourses and several terminals to make room for safer and more efficient runway layout. The remaining terminals would be converted into gate areas, and a new concourse would be built behind the current Bradley terminal, at the base of the horseshoe.

Hahn’s desire to limit the airport’s capacity may be politically untenable. The mayor has no control over other airports in the region, and the agencies that run them have made clear that they have no intention of changing the laws that limit their current capacity. As recently as March, Orange County voters quashed a proposal to build a new airport at the former El Toro Marine base.

But from the point of view of planning, Hahn’s notion of conceiving the airport as part of a broader, regional network strikes the right chord. The image of a decentralized city as an antidote to the congested metropolis has been a staple of Modernist planning strategies since the late 1920s, when Russian avant-garde architects Moisei Ginsburg and Mikhail Barshch proposed the first “Disurbanist” city, a grid of communal nodes that relegates the dense medieval city to oblivion.

No city has embodied that image more forcefully than Los Angeles. As early as the mid-1920s, even before Ginsburg and Barshch were indulging in their utopian fantasies, L.A.’s civic leaders were abandoning downtown in favor of a less centralized model of commercial and residential enclaves.

Wittingly or not, the Hahn airport plan is a logical outgrowth of that history. In the right hands, as the design is developed further, it could be envisioned as part of a more fluid regional transportation system, one of a series of portals to the sprawling megalopolis.

As architecture, the plan is less clear. Although Landrum & Brown will complete the master plan, architects for the specific structures have not yet been chosen.

Most recent airports, meanwhile, lack any real architectural stature. Inside, they are often labyrinthine, spiritless spaces that represent the worst of modern culture. Increasingly, these spaces have been stuffed with concession stands, transforming them into cluttered malls. Hahn’s team says the new terminals would be equal in size to two Universal CityWalks, a particularly queasy-making image of the relentless march of commercialization.

Other models exist. Nearly a century ago, structures such as New York’s original Pennsylvania Station (demolished in 1963) served as stunning monuments to an industrialized world on the move: Cavernous halls acted as great social mixing chambers, a kind of physical celebration of social fluidity.

In the past decade or so, architects such as Renzo Piano, Santiago Calatrava and Norman Foster have designed airports that rival turn-of-the-century monuments in their technological splendor and overall grandeur. These are heroic structures that elevate the image of mobility to an art form.

At LAX, concentrating the terminals into a compact zone would allow for the creation of a bold architectural statement. Stripped of the crassest commercial motives, and with an enlightened view of their potential symbolic function, they could end up being a high point of the design.

The plan’s handling of security, on the other hand, is more unsettling, veering away from idealism toward paranoia. The emphasis on crowds and cars runs counter to once-accepted wisdom. In the past, it has been airplanes, not airports, that have been the terrorist’s focal point. The slaying of two passengers by an attacker on July 4 at LAX could have happened in any large public gathering place. Following this logic, we will soon be redesigning Disneyland and Staples Center as well.

What the plan sacrifices, meanwhile, is the long-standing vision of transportation centers as gateways to a democratic culture. By stretching out the airport experience over two miles of checkpoints and transfer stops, the plan deals a severe blow to the freedom of movement that is such a fundamental aspect of our society.

Switching back and forth from cars to trains will add time to the traveling process, and meeting people at the airport would be a particular ordeal. Many of the conveniences we associate with LAX--being picked up or dropped off right outside the terminals, for example--would be impossible.

The social and psychological implications of such changes should not be taken lightly. The security-seasoned Israeli government, for example, has been embroiled in a debate over whether to allow bomb-sniffing dogs in its airports. Despite the obvious security benefits, Israelis have so far resisted the move because the dogs are reminiscent of those used by Nazi soldiers. Similarly, Americans have traditionally resisted allowing armed military personnel in public places, something that has been a familiar sight at European airports since the 1970s.

We are no longer such innocents. We increasingly live in a world where the abnormal is normal, where a multitude of discomforts--and even constriction of our civil liberties--seem suddenly tolerable. But the reconfiguration of LAX is a long-term proposition. With 10 years of planned construction, and a multibillion-dollar price tag, it assumes that such painful changes in attitude are here to stay. We should assure ourselves that the trade-offs embodied in Hahn’s plan are the best and most efficient way to achieve the right measure of security.