Architects take note.
I like American airports. You probably thought you would never hear anybody say that. Yes, getting through security can be a pain when you're waiting behind everyone and their grandmothers, but once you step through that last metal detector bottle neck, you enter a communal space of open seating areas, walking spaces and overpriced and tasteless souvenir shops and news stands. What I will term the "path design" of these airports (intentional or otherwise) funnels people towards the same shared space and facilitates proximity and interaction between them.
When I stepped out of the aeroplane at my connection in Thailand I realised had been many years since I had been to Bangkok. The new airport is an atrocity and a crime against humanity. I wandered through that compartmentalised steelglassconcrete prison, strewn with the most audacious advertisements that presented gold and diamond jewellery as some kind of spiritual journey.
Disgust aside, Bangkok international airport shares many similarities with Singapore's, which has security at gate, and fences off each secure waiting area with glass walls. This allows people with dangerous items closer to the aircraft and removes any flexibility of activity between the plaza and the gate. No way of walking over to the traveler in the next gate and telling himorher how much you like hisorher We Add Up T-shirt. In Thailand, security takes the same bottleneck role, and the ticket counter separates the main path from glass-walled waiting spaces: the worst of both worlds.
On the flight into India, I realised I was there already, clear from the laughing crying chatter chatter yelling of a hundred Indian children, and their grandmothers.
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A storm passed through today, brief and heavy, unexpected and welcome at the end of a week of scorching weather. I watched two boys moving a small herd of cows down the street, and a parent lead a crowd of particularly well behaved children in a game of free-for-all volleyball. The children here look healthy. Seemai says that they are, and that the local government has good health programs for them. I have to remember to ask him about vaccinations.
Walking back from the office, I saw a young boy, naked, squatting in the street to add his own to the carpet of waste already there and wondered about what Seemai has said. I wondered how it's possible when there is no sewage system and most waste water empties into open drains, clogged by leaves and all manner of rubbish, perhaps even too foul to breed mosquitoes. Every morning, a member from each house dredges up their drain with a narrow rake, leaving a pile of waste on the ground.
It was encouraging, I'll admit, to note that the boy didn't have diarrhoea.
I like American airports. You probably thought you would never hear anybody say that. Yes, getting through security can be a pain when you're waiting behind everyone and their grandmothers, but once you step through that last metal detector bottle neck, you enter a communal space of open seating areas, walking spaces and overpriced and tasteless souvenir shops and news stands. What I will term the "path design" of these airports (intentional or otherwise) funnels people towards the same shared space and facilitates proximity and interaction between them.
When I stepped out of the aeroplane at my connection in Thailand I realised had been many years since I had been to Bangkok. The new airport is an atrocity and a crime against humanity. I wandered through that compartmentalised steelglassconcrete prison, strewn with the most audacious advertisements that presented gold and diamond jewellery as some kind of spiritual journey.
Disgust aside, Bangkok international airport shares many similarities with Singapore's, which has security at gate, and fences off each secure waiting area with glass walls. This allows people with dangerous items closer to the aircraft and removes any flexibility of activity between the plaza and the gate. No way of walking over to the traveler in the next gate and telling himorher how much you like hisorher We Add Up T-shirt. In Thailand, security takes the same bottleneck role, and the ticket counter separates the main path from glass-walled waiting spaces: the worst of both worlds.
On the flight into India, I realised I was there already, clear from the laughing crying chatter chatter yelling of a hundred Indian children, and their grandmothers.
---
A storm passed through today, brief and heavy, unexpected and welcome at the end of a week of scorching weather. I watched two boys moving a small herd of cows down the street, and a parent lead a crowd of particularly well behaved children in a game of free-for-all volleyball. The children here look healthy. Seemai says that they are, and that the local government has good health programs for them. I have to remember to ask him about vaccinations.
Walking back from the office, I saw a young boy, naked, squatting in the street to add his own to the carpet of waste already there and wondered about what Seemai has said. I wondered how it's possible when there is no sewage system and most waste water empties into open drains, clogged by leaves and all manner of rubbish, perhaps even too foul to breed mosquitoes. Every morning, a member from each house dredges up their drain with a narrow rake, leaving a pile of waste on the ground.
It was encouraging, I'll admit, to note that the boy didn't have diarrhoea.
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