Airport architecture - two great books!

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Last month, there was a thread on this list about publications that had
articles about airport architecture.

If anyone is interested in airport architecture, there are two books that are
"must read" about how airports have evolved.

The first book, A Dream Takes Flight (written by Betsy Braden and Paul Hagan,
and published in 1989 by the University of Georgia Press) describes the
history of Atlanta Airport from its founding in the early 1900s to the completion
of the midfield terminal in 1980. The book devotes several chapters to how
architects refined the midfield terminal concept over the 1970s, including several
very rare drawings of designs that were never used for the terminal. The
first plans for the midfield terminal called for motorists to drive down a road
that would be located where the intra-airport subway is located today; large
parking decks would have been located in the middle of each of ATL's concourses!

The second book, Building for Air Travel (published in 1996 by the Art
Institute of Chicago) traces how airport terminal design has evolved over the last
century.

Both of these books are out of print, but they are relatively easy to find on
the used book search sites on the Web.

Finally, the November 15, 1971 issue of Aviation Week is a "special" issue
devoted to how airports were being modernized to accomodate the widebodies and
the planned supersonic transports, with more than 100 pages of articles about
airport terminal design. This magazine shows up occasionally on Ebay; the cover
photograph, of 7 BOAC, Pan Am, and TWA 747s parked at LHR's then-new Terminal
3 Pier, is one of Aviation Week's best.

Joe Wolf
Minneapolis, Minnesota

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