The new Barajas Airport: Madrid

 

With Wavy Airport, Rogers Merits Stirling Prize

Bloomberg News | Colin Amery

Oct. 18 – What is it about Madrid’s airport that makes it so special? How has it become the only airport in the world to win the coveted Stirling Prize for its U.K. architects, Richard Rogers Partnership?

Now that the fuss and excitement of the jury’s deliberations and the partying in London’s trendy Roundhouse is over, it is worth looking hard at Rogers’s triumph. There is no doubt that he deserved the prize. He actually had two buildings in the short list — the Spanish airport and the National Assembly for Wales in Cardiff.

The airport is way ahead as a stylish and adventurous concept; the Welsh Assembly is good yet more routine. Rogers is not just an architect. Tony Blair made him a Labour life peer and he is politically active. He wrote a White Paper for the U.K. government in 2000 grandly entitled “Towards an Urban Renaissance.”

Some of the gloss on this document was dimmed by the opening that year of the Millennium Dome, which Rogers designed and was a failure both as a building and as an event.

Rogers has always been controversial. He trained at the Architectural Association in London and at the Yale School of Architecture, graduating in 1962. Yale was where he met Norman Foster and after returning to Britain he set up practice as Team Four, with Foster and their wives, both of them architects too.

This firm lasted a while, but Rogers’s big break was winning the international competition with a fellow Italian — Rogers was born in Florence in 1933 of Anglo-Italian parentage.

Exposed Innards

That Italian was Renzo Piano, and together they designed the Pompidou Center in Paris that established the style in which the building’s service ducts and stairs and escalators were exposed on the outside of the building. This approach reaches its apotheosis in London’s Lloyd’s Building which was completed in 1984. Some of Rogers’s crueler critics dubbed the style “Bowelism” as it exposed a building’s inner workings.

It also exposed the vast difference between Rogers and his former partner. Foster’s designs are infinitely more refined and cool than the edgy and expressionist works of Rogers. The structure of a Rogers building is usually visible and often emphasized. There is an edginess, almost a flaunting of elements that is very much of our time.

It is a relief that Rogers’s buildings are not too smooth. They have a kind of modern earthiness, something that you can also experience in his wife Ruth Rogers’s new-style Italian cooking at London’s River Cafe. It must be the Italian in him.

`Spectacular Spaces’

Madrid’s Barajas Airport was described by Rogers at the prize giving as “a hymn to travel, to the excitement of travel.” His aim had been to create a great wave of a roof and wherever possible bring daylight into the public spaces. It is the roof that excited the jury which also praised “the sheer scale and the spectacular spaces and also the straightforward linear diagram of the plan.”

The architect wanted spaces uncluttered by shops, stairs and escalators and for passengers in the new terminal to feel “stress free.” This is achieved by the lovely roof that swoops above you and is lined with beautiful bamboo and frequently punctuated with oval skylights.

Although the building is long — one kilometer (some three- quarters of a mile) — and large — one million square meters (11 million square feet) — the spaces are subtly divided by elements of elegant steel structure that are painted in a graduated color scheme to avoid dull uniformity.

Airports are places you go through. They need to be simple to understand so that your route to the plane is clear and the collection of your luggage is simple. It is not the architect’s fault that planes and airports are getting larger and larger. What Rogers has achieved at this Madrid terminal is clarity and elegance and structural vigor.

Heathrow’s Wave

He has applied a similar approach to London’s Heathrow Terminal Five, which will open its first phase in 2008. The single-wave roof is an engineering triumph and we can’t blame Rogers for the doubling of road traffic to and from Heathrow that the increase in passengers will cause.

At least, he will have given us an attractive place to wait. The long vistas of the Barajas Terminal are memorable and the quality of light is superb. Rogers and his Spanish partners, Lamela Studios, have helped airport design really take off.