SHoP’s Distributed Airport Terminals

Speaking of transportation paradigms, I remember New York Magazine’s featuring a rethinking of airport travel from SHoP architects:

It’s a high-speed-rail loop, in which trains would serve both as a means of conveyance to the airport and, in effect, as the airport. In a bold new check-in paradigm, passengers would get their boarding passes and go through security at special stations in Union Square and Red Hook (and Astoria and Grand Central and …), then hop on trains that would let them out directly at their plane. Such an approach would have the added benefit of reducing the airport space devoted to terminals, making room for more runways.

Airport Shuttle System — While onboard the shuttle trains, passengers could check in luggage, shop duty-free online, and have a drink or two before disembarking at the gate.
Photo-illustration by SHoP Architects

While their proposal to double the amount of runways at JFK is nigh impossible due to the limitations of airspace and safe airplane taxi regulations, this proposal is certainly interesting. A precedent (on a smaller scale) is undoubtedly Eero Saarinen’s Mobile Lounges featured at Dulles International Airport, but on a grand scale. This is a grand gesture in the manner of Daniel Burnham, and because of that, it has zero chance of happening in New York City. However, this plan could be executed quite nicely at a tabla rasa, such as all of those cities China is building.

New York Penn Station Terminal Service Plant

NY Penn Station Terminal Service Plant - Exterior

The Penn Station Service Building; A 1908 Structure Survives A ‘Monumental Act of Vandalism’:

The service plant held the key to the railroad’s new operation, for it provided the electric power for the engines in and out of New York. Research by the industrial archaeologist Thomas Flagg indicates that it was also used to supply heat, light, elevator hydraulics and refrigeration for the station as well as compressed air for braking and signaling. It even incinerated the station’s garbage.

The mid-block building, 160 feet long and 86 feet high, is divided by a north-south fire wall with boilers for power generation on the west side and power distribution, offices and other elements on the east.

The station and the service plant were designed by McKim, Mead & White, specifically Charles McKim and partner William Symmes Richardson. Writing in Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers for October 1910, Richardson said that, on the station itself, “all unnecessary detail of ornamentation was omitted.”

For the service building the architects assembled some of the simplest elements from the station in the Stony Creek pink granite.
The Roman Doric exterior, a row of severe pilasters bracketing ventilation windows covered with iron grills, is about as plain as a building can get and still have an identifiable style. Cleaned, it could be a post-modern historical society or a crematorium.

NY Penn Station Terminal Service Plant - Interior

NY Penn Station Terminal Service Plant - Control Room

All photos care of the Library of Congress:

New York Penn Station Terminal Service Plant

Michigan Central Station, Detroit

Michigan Central Station (also known as Michigan Central Depot or MCS), built in 1913 for the Michigan Central Railroad, was Detroit, Michigan’s, passenger rail depot from its opening in 1913, when the previous Michigan Central Station burned, until the last Amtrak train pulled away from the station on January 6, 1988.

Michigan Central Station, Detroit, originally uploaded by primeau

Le Corbusier and La Ville Radieuse

La Ville radieuse

During our Jane Jacobs – The Death and Life of Great American Cities book club many ideas and movements will be discussed, ideas which are not particularly en vogue at the moment.

Le Corbusier, Swiss-born French architect of considerable fame is never out of vogue, but some of his more radical ideas have fallen considerably out of favor with the intelligentsia. La Ville radieuse, his 1935 opus on urban thought is one of those items. Envisioned as an antidote to the filth of the (mostly European) cities which were just beginning to be rebuilt from the horrors of the World War; the logical planning of this machine city was conceived as a centrally-planned community of the now-famous towers in parks.

LeCorbusier and the Radiant City Contra True Urbanity and the Earth:

The Radiant City grew out of this new conception of capitalist authority and a pseudo-appreciation for workers’ individual freedoms. The plan had much in common with the Contemporary City – clearance of the historic cityscape and rebuilding utilizing modern methods of production. In the Radiant City, however, the pre-fabricated apartment houses, les unites, were at the center of “urban” life. Les unites were available to everyone (not just the elite) based upon the size and needs of each particular family. Sunlight and recirculating air were provided as part of the design. The scale of the apartment houses was fifty meters high, which would accommodate, according to Corbusier, 2,700 inhabitants with fourteen square meters of space per person. The building would be placed upon pilotus, five meters off the ground, so that more land could be given over to nature. Setback from other unites would be achieved by les redents, patterns that Corbusier created to lessen the effect of uniformity.
…
Corbusier spends a great deal of the Radiant City manifesto elaborating on services available to the residents. Each apartment block was equipped with a catering section in the basement, which would prepare daily meals (if wanted) for every family and would complete each families’ laundry chores. The time saved would enable the individual to think, write, or utilize the play and sports grounds which covered much of the city’s land. Directly on top of the apartment houses were the roof top gardens and beaches, where residents sun themselves in Anatural” surroundings – fifty meters in the air. Children were to be dropped off at les unites’ day care center and raised by scientifically trained professionals. The workday, so as to avoid the crisis of overproduction, was lowered to five hours a day. Women were enjoined to stay at home and perform household chores, if necessary, for five hours daily. Transportation systems were also formulated to save the individual time. Corbusier bitterly reproaches advocates of the horizontal garden city (suburbs) for the time wasted commuting to the city. Because of its compact and separated nature, transportation in the Radiant City was to move quickly and efficiently. Corbusier called it the vertical garden city.