The new Terminal B: not bad at all! JDavidsonNYC writes
Breaking: It’s not broken! Photo: LaGuardia Gateway Partners Enter La Guardia Airport’s Terminal B from the side door, next to the parking structure, and you walk down a hallway paved with polychrome light. Look up, and you see sunshine flowing through a translucent cityscape affixed to the glass façade and cascading on the floor — an artwork by Sabine Hornig.
So much deliberate New Yorkiness may be a bit lost on the multitudes who will scramble through these halls, aching to get out of town or back to the real thing. But then every big airport addresses two quasi-opposite conditions: the desire to get in, through, and out at a brisk and unbroken step and the need to linger for hours, even entire days or nights, without triggering a psychotic rage.
Photographs: LaGuardia Gateway Partners Photographs: LaGuardia Gateway Partners All that is gone. The designers of the new La Guardia have anticipated various forms of travel-related discomfort and tried their best to ease them. Most passers-through will never thank the designers or even notice the analgesics.
Flying is no fun. It hasn’t been for a very long time, and ever since 9/11, it’s only gotten more frustrating. The first commandment of airport design should be Don’t make it worse. In this, HOK succeeds. But La Guardia Gateway Partners, the entity that built and operates the airport on behalf of the Port Authority, goes beyond that to claim that this is a world-class facility — and they’ve even got UNESCO’s Prix Versailles to prove it. The rhetoric overreaches.