ABSTRACT
If the acme of success in design is to ‘achieve ubiquity, to become banal’ then the airport has achieved what Bruce Mau would term ‘design nirvana’ (Mau and The Institute without Boundaries 2004: 3). Despite the spectacular engineering and monumental flashiness of many modern airports, the basic conceptual architecture for facilitating aeromobility has become pervasive. We walk-we stop-we sit-we walk-we stop. We progress through a set of procedures that facilitate mobility. This rhythm of stopping and going, waiting and then moving in climate-controlled, closely surveilled environments is familiar because, increasingly, we experience it in all traffic. This is the global space of flows. It stops a lot. And yet, beyond complaints about ‘jams’ and delays, we tend not to focus on how much ‘stillness’ is operationally required for a high-speed traversal through this planet’s aeromobile environments. From the packing of clothes in fixed containers to strapping your belt – tight and low – stillness and all its requisite activities, technologies and behaviours are fundamental to the ‘flow’ architectures that organize the motion of the globalizing multitudes of today.
