FosterPartners Reinventing the Airport重塑机场.pdfVIP

Reinventing the Airport Two global urban scenarios are rapidly unfolding. The first of these is the explosive growth of cities: by 2030 more than five billion of the planet’s predicted eight billion inhabitants are expected to be living in cities. The second is the shift of balance of growth from the so-called ‘developed’ to ‘developing’ countries. As an example of what this global shift means in comparative terms, in 1939 London was the highest populated city in the world. Ten years later it still shared the big-league with cities such as Paris, Milan and Moscow. However, at the turn of the new century a demographic map of the world reveals how the European cities have receded into a mini-league, while the concentrations of population elsewhere have enlarged and proliferated. This is particularly true on the Asian Pacific Rim. One of the implications of this shift is migration around the globe on a very large scale. Airbus, for example, anticipates that by 2010 only twenty per cent of air travellers will be business passengers. A key indicator in this respect is the accelerated rate of investment in infrastructure in the Pacific Rim, particularly in airports, which are being built on a hitherto unparalleled scale. A further shift can be discerned in the nature of such infrastructure projects. The edges between infrastructure and architecture are becoming more blurred. We can see this in structures concerned with information transmission — communication towers and platforms, for example. But we can also see it in structures for physical communication, such as the airport. Is the airport infrastructure or is it architecture? Or is it perhaps inhabited infrastructure? As these edges become less finite, the distinctions between the role of the architect, the engineer, and the other professions become similarly blurred. New infrastructure projects are typically becoming more publicly accessible, more multifunctional, less unidirectional. Together