Poetry in motion - rail terminal at Roissy Airport, Paris, France

Architectural Review, The, Feb, 1995

The modern airport is perhaps beginning to become a recognisable grown-up building type that offers more than just a means of getting onto aeroplanes, but which has a clearly defined series of patterns that give psychological reassurance to passengers as they move through its complex paths between land and air travel and vice versa. It therefore becomes particularly potent when effectively married to that established nineteenth-century type, the railway station, for instance at Roissy (p28), where the might of the TGV (Trains a Grande Vitesse) system - the French end of the splendid new European rail network - is beginning to be linked to the intercontinental air transport system. It could be a portent of the future, for particularly now the Channel Tunnel is working, it may be much easier to take a relatively quick train journey within Europe to Roissy than to catch a short hop flight (with all concomitant hassles) to Heathrow - as yet, still the world's busiest international airport. Foster's Chek Lap Kok in Hong Kong, as can be seen from our short coverage, promises to be even more dramatic experientially, for the trains actually enter the building and their platforms become part of it (look at the transverse section of the terminal on p55): it will doubtless become the international airport for much of south China.

Even without the interaction, airports are acquiring new presence - for instance the huge Denver airport by C.W.Fentress, J.H.Bradburn & Associates (p60), which, for the moment, may be an economic step too far; but it could turn out to be an appropriate symbol for the regeneration of a large chunk of middle America. Hamburg's new air terminal by Meinhard von Gerkan (p56) reinforces the power of the most delightful and successful of north German cities.

Railway stations, too, can help to regenerate, as Arne Henriksen's little station at Sandvika shows (p44). It is a comparatively small intervention which unites two sides of a town previously sundered by the tracks themselves. Even Henriksen's tiny Slependen halt (p48) has a social function in connecting two halves of a suburb divided by a gulch. Much more clearly, the station by Cruz and Ortiz in Huelva is an important device for linking a community (p40).

The importance of transport interchanges has always been celebrated by grand figures in urban life, from the caravanserai and inns of the Middle Ages to the amazing daring of the nineteenth-century railway stations. Santiago Calatrava's wild wings on his station at Lyons (p36) continue this tradition - as does the terminal for containers at Oakland by Jordan Woodman Dobson (p64), where the power of docks is celebrated in a way that does not shame Telford and Brunel - and causes us to ask why so few clients and architects have risen to the romance and wonder of trade. All cities, all communities, no matter how dispersed, need transport interchange buildings. They incorporate human transactions, movements of people, money and perceptions, that require architectural response. That is what this issue is about.

Paul Andreu is nothing if not bold. He has been chief architect and planner of Aeroports de Paris (ADP) for 25 years, right from the creation of Roissy Charles de Gaulle I to the present day. On the way, he has been responsible for airports in the Middle East, Africa, Chile and China, the basic concept for Kansai (AR November 1994) and for the execution of von Spreckelsen's monumental Grande Arche at the end of the Champs-Elysees axis (AR August 1989). Throughout, he has always had a thoroughly French love of grand gesture. The results have not always been entirely happy in human terms. Charles de Gaulle I, for instance, has turned out to be one of the most maddening airport terminals in the world to use. Its annular form round a dreary central void (admittedly crossed with dramatic travelators in transparent tubes) is directionless, extremely confusing and difficult to extend.

Charles de Gaulle II overcame the problems of being too self-centred by being made as a series of separate arcs arranged along both sides of a grand axis. It works well, if a little boringly, and could doubtless be projected everlastingly eastwards in the same pattern. Its major problem was perhaps that each element could only be reached by bus, and this terminal, like the first one, was a good distance from the nearest railway station (again reached by bus).

When the opportunity came to link the airport complex to the TGV (Trains a Grande Vitesse) ring that connects the new fast main lines which focus on Paris, both ADP and TGV welcomed the opportunity with relish. Strategically, it makes Roissy the heart of a huge area that can be reached easily and quickly by train, one that encompasses Brussels and Amsterdam, and could extend to mid Germany, and even to the south of England through the Channel Tunnel. French national planning foresees Roissy as a threat to Frankfurt in the east and the huge London complex of airports in the west. It is a brave and admirable piece of infrastructure planning: the French grand gesture on an international scale.