From Curbed:Not a month after architecture geeks and Jet Age preservationists mourned the demise of JFK Airport's saucer-like PanAm terminal did news emerge that the NYC airport's other midcentury monolith, its alternative insignia of the Jetsons era, will get a new lease on life as a clubby hotel, a quintessentially modern stay-over produced by swank hotel scion André Balazs. Once the TWA Terminal, the building—a slick, sloping space reminiscent of a minimalist paper airplane—was a 1962 project of midcentury stud (and Mad Men favorite) Eero Saarinen, and while American architect Robert A.M. Stern once called it the "Grand Central of the jet age," the space has been basically empty since 2001.
What exactly does Balazs have in store for the terminal, a building he once called "a masterpiece by my personal architectural hero"? It's to be The Standard, Flight Center—the commas make it trendy, see—and will be subdivided into hotel rooms, restaurants, bars, a museum, and conference facilities. While the timeline for the project remains, for now, enshrouded in a fog of mystery, the city's Port Authority agency has been trying for years to revitalize the space, and are reportedly "look[ing] forward to ... a presentation of a final vision."
I hope the rooms are furnished with earplugs.
6 comments:
A hotel? They must be nuts!
Ahhh. I love the smell of jet fuel in the morning along with my continental breakfast.
Another NYC destination for bland piped-in lounge music, ambient blacklights, trollops in blue lipstick.
Ten years later they know exactly the type of "creative" way to terraform the swooping moonscape of the Sarinen terminal:
"The death of so-called site specific art came in 2004, at a talked-about show most people never saw. The concept was that artists would 'respond' to Eero Saarinen's somewhat overwhelming 1962 terminal building at Kennedy Airport (considered high Modernist kitsch by some architects), an activity with roughly the same significance as small lice-eating birds 'responding' to a rhinoceros. It consisted of such obvious and expected gestures as running political slogans on the defunct terminal's arrivals and departures board, piping sound art through the intercom, and so forth.
Once admitted to this vast playground from their usual physically constraining warrens in Chelsea and Williamsburg, and perhaps because the art was so familiar as not to hold anyone's attention, the artists went berserk at an opening night party and trashed the terminal."
Has any hotel ever been a success this close to airport runways and terminals where the airport is operating takeoffs and landings at capacity?
What happens when there is a security breach in the airport? Does the hotel get locked down too?
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