Nicholas Torres
Designer - Planner - Researcher
Integrating Airports
Master of Architecture Thesis
Prof. Anne-Catrin Schultz
Challenge
Create an integrative design approach regarding airports and their surrounding enviroments.
Vision
The modern airport often acts as a grand, inhuman, spectacle of pseudo-urbanism on the isolated periphery of the urban sphere. With a growing desire for urban connectivity and transparency in our modern society, there must be a way to re-connect the airport back to our cities. This thesis deals with the concept of adapting the urban pedestrian experience to the airport, using and modifying the current barren landscape to make the airport a “place”, humanizing and activating this transportation node in a post security-industrial complex world. Using Logan Airport and its neighbor East Boston as an experimental site, this concept can be proposed to be used as a model for the reconnection of urban-sited U.S. airports. This thesis is proposing that Logan and its surrounding community can begin to play off each other, each having programmatic uses that draws its respective users across the harsh boundary line through means of program, activities, and permanent connections, giving airport users an experience outside the hermetic secure areas and East Boston residents access to new services. This will be done in a series of transition zones along a new urban corridor from the Logan Control Tower to Central Square, with branches along the path to the harbor and re-introduced landscape. The scheme will provide a clear physical link between the neighborhood and the airport through multiple options for movement as well as adapt existing infrastructure such as the parking garages to reduce waste and promote responsible urbanistic use within the airport property.