Alice Haddad, 10 Nov. 2013 Abstract // Call for Papers Kunstlicht, vol.35 (2014), no.

Panoramic perception within airports: an immersive illusion

(Provisional title) This essay will be concerned with the architectural arrangements that position the passenger/visitor in airports immersive landscape through the implementation of panoramic views. Historically, the fascination for aviation has determined the airport as a place for spectacle and reverie. Le Corbusier (1935) thought of the airport as a naked, invisible architecture that would bring the users closer to the splendor of technology1. Furthermore, the airports connotation as a gateway to the world linked it to a metaphor for evasion. Panoramic views inside the airport, usually attributed to the large windows or balconies framing the departing and arriving planes on the airfield, supported this twofold view. Whereas open-air balconies presented a socializing effect2 that contradicts recurrent conceptions of the airport as a generic non-space, the panoramic windows role is rather ambiguous. It maintains a constant and insulated distance between the spectator and the spectacle. Analogies can be drawn with the painted panorama, en vogue at the end of the 18th century. While detaching the observers from the scene into which they are immersed, panoramas offered a sense of reality, organization and control while they actually acted as an illusion. They embody the phantasmagorical category as defined by Theodor Adorno3 that is they serve the mechanism of ideological propaganda. Within the airport, the spectators gaze is directed towards the outside, which is, however, paradoxically the heart of the airport: its inner fortified courtyard. In there, the panorama coexists with and is subjected to a panoptic structure. Recent development affected airport architecture as a whole. The passenger-as-consumer has become the main target of commercial strategies, leaving out areas for contemplation from their spatial scheme. The architectures transparency has become impossible to achieve due to radical border delimitations supporting current security procedures and the terminals expansion and multiplications. Thus panoramas nowadays could be regarded as obsolete, however, as observed in parallel fields, from painting to cinema to virtual screening, the notion of panoramic view has developed towards the broader conception of panoramic perception, expanding the horizon of vision. Eventually, the essay will expose how different conceptions of the panorama coexist within the airport over time, and how they participate in the airports very restricted and controlled reality by triggering mobility as much as immobility.

GORDON, A. (2004), Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure, Metropolitan Books. 2 ADEY, P., Architectural geographies of the airport balcony: mobility, sensation and the theatre of flight, Geogr. Ann. B, 90 (2008) 1, pp. 2947. 3 CRARY, J., Gricault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth Century, Grey Room, 9 (2002), pp. 5-25.