About the airport: it's a disappointment, but with one astounding exception. Much of Sky Harbor has the dim, uninspiring feel of a shopping mall from the 1970s. But all that blandness is nearly balanced out by a single concourse that must rank as one of the great airport spaces in North America, if not the world. Read on.
Sky Harbor's a busy place -- home to a U.S. Airways hub, an important station for Southwest (the airline's fourth-busiest, after Chicago Midway, Las Vegas, and Baltimore), and substantial flight operations by all other major U.S. carriers. British Airways gets into the act with non-stop flights to Heathrow. It's the ninth-busiest airport in the nation, handling nearly 40 million passengers a year. So you'd expect such an important gateway to host a pretty substantial airport.
Well, think again. Our flight (Southwest from Chicago Midway) pulled up to a C Concourse gate in Terminal 4, a sprawling complex that handles about 80 percent of the airport's traffic. Stepping off the jetway, my first experience of Phoenix was classic American nowheresville: low ceilings, fluorescent lights, dull carpeting, few windows, and almost nothing to mark a traveler's arrival in the great American southwest.
Phoenix? This could have been Pittsburgh or Portland -- Maine or Oregon, it wouldn't have mattered.
Our connecting flight (to Albuquerque) was in the D concourse, next one up, so off we went, following a long, straight characterless corridor. The next leg was running late, so I steeled myself for another soul-deadening boring airport layover. Imagine my surprise, then, when we turned the corner to enter the D concourse, and found this:
First impression: Holy cow! Light, air, clean lines, large windows that fronted onto one of PHX's parallel runways, where a Southwest 737 was just rotating up as it zipped past. And sky! You could see sky! Walking further in, I began picking up on details: the strange oversized canopies over each gate, the unique compass pattern of the floor tiles, the generous amount of public art (including a wacky and completely functionless arch), and all done in materials that reminded me of where I was in the world.
I had stumbled onto Concourse D, opened in 2005, the newest part of Terminal 4. The rest of the 80-gate complex dates back to 1990, apparently still the era of ugly airport architecture, at least in Phoenix. How anyone could build a completely new 80-gate airline terminal complex in 1990 and have it come out so blah is beyond me. Something to do with air conditioning, perhaps?
Back to the present: Concourse D has only eight gates, but it felt big. And open. And important. Passing through, coming or going, the place had enough good vibes going to make you feel like you were doing something special. Like all good transportation buildings, if functioned like a church: it bestowed significance. In its design, it said this: "Entering or leaving our city is an occasion that's important enough to take place in a fittingly grand setting."
It also said this: "If this concourse is any indication, the rest of Phoenix and the region served by this airport is one happening place."
Pretty good for a space with just eight gates. How did they do it? By paying attention to the big picture, I think, but not losing sight of details.
The layout is simple: a pier juts out onto the tarmac, four gates on either side. But the genius part is at the end of the pier. What usually happens here is that additional gates are clustered at the end to maximize the number of aircraft positions. Makes sense, but the result is often a blocked-in claustrophobic dead end, like you see here in Concourse C:
Well, not at Phoenix's Concourse D. Here, it ends in a giant window that extends from floor up to high ceiling, and offers unobstructed views of one of airports very active runways. This serves to reconnect travelers with the magic and power of flight, and creates an immense amount of excitement. As a bonus, it also floods the space with light. And, dear sweet mother of God, the windows panes are not the trendy but evil horizontal shape. Whoever make this decision chose right, thankfully avoiding the "window as fence in gulag or stockyard" look.
Paradoxically, the big window makes the concourse seem both infinite and intimate at the same time. The great wall of glass serves to include the outdoors as part of the space, making it seem grand. But it also acts as a natural gathering point, acting as a destination that naturally attracts visitors to it. Concourse D isn't that big, but the distance to Gate D8 out at the end doesn't seem nearly so bothersome when there's such a wonderful magnet drawing you there.
But there's more. Look up! Rather than a flat roof, Concourse D sports a creased top, with the lowest part running along the center and either side flaring up and out, which allows more glass, which means more sky and light. This design makes the place seem bigger, but it's more than that. By its appearance and shape, the roof helps the concourse celebrate the act of flight. (See the photos above.)
Let me explain. I think the best airport buildings find ways to use design to create anticipation and excitement through symbol and appearance. In a structure that stands completely still, they somehow capture the excitement of motion and the freedom of flight.
Good examples are the acclaimed terminals designed at the dawn of the jet age by Finnish architect Eero Saarinen: the ex-Trans World Airlines hub at New York's JFK Airport and the main terminal of the then-new Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C. Here's what they look like from the outside:
In both cases, Saarinen used the roof to create a dramatic space that expressed the magic of flight that really must have been present in the pre-deregulation age. (I got just the barest taste of that as a kid in the early 1970s, when our mother made my two brothers and me wear a coat and tie to fly coach to visit our uncle in Atlanta!)
Well, deregulation or not, the act of flight is still an age-old dream that we in the present day have realized. And the best airport spaces acknowledge and celebrate that -- something that I think is even more important in the age of security lines and packed airplanes and extra fees.
In Phoenix, Concourse D does this by literally opening up to the sky. The ceiling soars diagonally up and out, making us feel we're already airborne. It's quite a neat effect. And contrast that with, say, Denver, where the main terminal's signature white fabric tent peaks work exactly the opposite way, sloping down in all directions, making a traveler feel small and puny. (And which from a distance look like a pack of Ku Klux Klansmen. See below.)
In Phoenix, the ceiling crease is duplicated in the big window, by the way, which helps tie the whole place together and employing perspective to make it all seem so much bigger than it really is. It's like you're inside a box being unfolded. The central metaphor in all of this, I suppose, is that of a bird in flight. Maybe that's kind of simple-minded, but then sometimes simple is best.
Perspective is also used in four unconventional canopies gracing the boarding areas, two per gate, which looked to me like drawbridges being lowered. (Maybe that's the intent? After all, they're leading to gates.) These are slanted, but in the opposite direction of the ceiling, so they start high and drop lower. This has the effect of making the place seem even bigger!
Colors, materials, and details are all in harmony with each other, and with what you'd expect in the American Southwest. Bathrooms and eating places all worked well. Even so, the place is graced with some daring public art that challenges even as it welcomes.
For instance, the arch. I can't explain its purpose or its appearance. To me, it looked like an ice sculpture you might see at the Quebec Winter Carnival, and what that has to do with Phoenix, Ariz. is beyond me. But here's the thing: it stood guard over the entrance to the concourse, offering absolutely no barrier, as if in mockery of all the security checkpoints that rule air travel today. How refreshing to encounter something that says "Walk Right Through As Much As You Like!"
Also, the wall that backs up against the rest of the complex is filled with shiny metal abstract sculptures. I'm not prepared to explain their significance, either, but I can tell you the effect they produce, at least when I was there. With the late afternoon sun sinking low, all the light flooding in horizontally hit these things and then was scattered in a million different directions, filling the concourse interior with a kind of crystalline sunlight.
If I had one issue with Concourse D, it's that they didn't resist the temptation to install televisions in the gate areas. And once the sun goes down, they reflect off the darkened window glass, causing passengers to be surrounded with multiple images, sometimes of competing stations. Ugh.
I'm not sure if Concourse D seems so good because the rest of Phoenix Airport is so bad, but it's possible. The rest of Terminal 4 is a low-ceilinged pedestrian-unfriendly horror show. If nothing else, it acts as a symbol of the area it serves only in the sense that it's a desert of effective airport design.
We had time, so I took a walk around the whole place. It took forever, because, like Phoenix itself, Terminal 4 sprawls. Passengers switching concourses are forced on seemingly endless treks through long straight passages the exact opposite of Concord D -- they seem longer than they should, which is the last thing you want to do to add stress to a plane change.
I'll give them credit for at least keeping views open to the tarmacs and runways, and not cluttering up the passageways with retail kiosk that obliterate sightlines. (They save those for the actual concourses themselves.)
One thing they do do is treat travelers to historical aircraft info etched right onto the glass, giving you a chance to bone up on your B377 Stratocruiser trivia. Unfortunately, people on the moving walkways can't take them in (I missed them entirely until I finally noticed one), and those on foot and making a connection are probably too busy to care.
Any alternatives to schlepping insane distances on foot? Glad you asked! PHX is close to finishing a light rail line that will connect Terminals 2, 3, and 4 (what happened to 1?) with a remote parking area. Set to open in 2013, its distinctive feature is what airport officials claim is the only airport transit bridge in the world with enough clearance to handle the world's largest passenger aircraft. Guess they don't like tunneling in Phoenix. Anyway, the result is a taxiway that crosses over a terminal access road on a bridge, then goes under the new bridge. Here's a Frontier Airbus trying it on for size:
Otherwise, the rest of Terminal 4 is endless blah of lookalike concourses, emphasis on the endless. It's like a trip back in time to the world's largest mall but in the 1970s, but with the stores removed. (Darn! Just when I could have used some Orange Julius!)
Two things made the walk worth taking. I saw not one but two active shoeshine stands, a rarity in this kind of airport and something that provided at least a little character. Also, I happened to be there when the British Airways flight was in pre-boarding, so I checked out the airline's Upper Class lounge. What a hoot! Go up a stairway and through a door, and you're in Gatwick Airport, seemingly. There's tea and coffee, private wood-lined "callbox" kiosks for privacy in using the telephone, and a garrulous female attendant who encouraged me to look around.
I didn't get into the Terminal 4 terminal itself, but it's submerged underneath a parking garage and looks to be of the concrete-brutalism-this-is-the-future school of design, just like the rest of the place. It's a pity. If the rest of the airport matched Concourse D, you'd have a candidate for best airport in the nation, and one of the best anywhere.
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