September 2024

Commentary on architectural blunders in monthly serial.

COLUMBUS — Columbus Municipal Airport is getting a unique and futuristic-looking air traffic control tower. Airport officials unveiled the designs, made by Marlon Blackwell Architects, for the new tower on Thursday. Airport officials say the new control tower is designed with Columbus’ rich architectural history in mind.

Our heads are stuffed with assumptions about “the future,” mainly that it will be more futuristic — meaning, at least, that things must look different than they look now. In the world of architecture, that means buildings must be wildly different, even shockingly different. We must believe in a future that contains no recognizable human touchstones. It will be obvious, when the future actually arrives, that this was essentially a psychopathic Jacobin-type movement to upend the culture of Western Civ. And for what end? For what benefit? For the aggrandizement of the architects playing a dumb game of one-upping each other in how violently they can disturb the cultural consensus.  Any game played at the gigantic scale can turn into a racket, and that is what this Modernist Futurism (let’s call it) has become.

As I see the future, I would not assume that commercial aviation persists as a feature of daily life very far into the future. In fact, it is already disintegrating visibly at the margins — in the ability of airplane manufacturers to produce planes that work dependably; of airlines being able to maintain their planes reliably; of passengers being able to afford the air-fares; of the level of service to remain acceptable (meaning, delays, cancellations, poor cabin comfort, safety, available competent pilots); in the availability of affordable jet fuel derived from oil. There’s already a lot to be concerned about.

The building pictured above is certainly striking, but mostly because it fails to signify any comprehensible idea of what the building is for. It doesn’t really help humans to be confronted with incomprehensible objects. At best, this air-control tower looks like a hybrid composed of a computer server and a very large robot. And the scale is necessarily domineering. I believe that not only do we not want or need to be dominated by computerized A-I, and any sort of robots, BUT, I’m serenely convinced that the future will not be able to deliver either the robots or the A-I very far ahead because our electric grid is too flimsy to permit it. I’m also persuaded that if A-I and robotics become too dangerously intrusive to daily life, citizens will band together to destroy the distributed hardware of the electric grid. They will shoot out the transformers and the relays rather than submit to robotic fuckery. Chew on that this month.