Foster's Stansted Pavilion
Stansted perfected a concept that dominates airport architecture to this day
“It really is one big pavilion,” was my first thought after I stepped off the transit system into the main terminal at London’s Stansted Airport after a recent flight.
Designed by Norman Foster and opened in 1991, the terminal is heralded as prime example of the “high-tech architecture” style that Foster and others embodied in the 1970s and 1980s. The terminal is a single big roof of gridded, identical vaults held up by structural “trees.” And it would be completely transparent from curb-to-ramp if it were not for the security, customs, and the other physical divisions necessary of modern air travel.
“One of the prime virtues of this building derives from its simplicity and this has been due above all to the decision to opt for a simple rectangular volume, having an heroic but intimate scale, from whence it is possible to have immediate visual contact with both the aircraft and the runway,” wrote Kenneth Frampton in the Act of the Jury for the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion Award for European Architecture in 1990 that went to Foster’s Stansted terminal. “This new-found proximity is able to restore something of the early romance and excitement of flight.”
My experience at Stansted was slightly less grand than Frampton’s 1990 description. Security concerns, concession needs, and border requirements have broken up the floor level of Foster’s great pavilion. And the terminal was absolutely heaving when I arrived; it handled nearly 28 million passengers last year in a space that, after a 1999 expansion, was designed for about 15 million annually.
“Architecture that’s conflicted by success,” wrote Instagram user Autofill_Password in a comment on a recent post. “A simple and pleasing experience tucked away at the end of a suburban rail line. Now a zoo and those careful lines have been smashed to accommodate volume.”
Stansted today is the domain of high-volume budget airlines. Ryanair operates more than three-quarters of the flights there in September with an average of 190 seats per flight, according to Cirium Diio schedules. Discounters Jet2 and EasyJet are distant a second and third in terms of flights.
But I’m not here to debate an expansion of Stansted’s terminal. I am interested in why the structure is considered such a seminal work by so many.
Many credit Foster for re-inventing the “big roof” concept for airports with Stansted. In other words, a light an airy structure above with all of the utilities necessary of modern buildings buried underneath.
As Foster put it himself in a 2023 lecture at the Seoul National University School of Architecture:
“An airport, like Stansted, questioned the conventional idea of a terminal, which was that it was a sandwich of space and the roof had a lot of ducts with a handling plant on the top, which cooled the air. Lots of electric lighting then because you’ve got no natural light, so you’ve got the heat load of the lighting — very energy consuming [and] not very nice. I mean claustrophobic, which is why airports had such a bad name. When we reconsidered that, and put all the handling at the bottom, underneath so that you could open the top to natural light and sunlight, so for most of the time you don’t need electric light, you suddenly had something that was joyful, that would uplift the spirits.”
He basically describes contemporary airport architecture in a nut shell. Denver, Heathrow terminals 2 and 5, Hong Kong, LaGuardia Terminal B, Munich, the list goes on.
After much reading, I agree that Foster did achieve what one could consider an idealized version of a contemporary steel-and-glass terminal with a big roof. His repeating domes and identical structural trees a “modern expression of a classical temple,” as Archaeological Research Services (ARS) put it in a 2023 heritage statement on the terminal commissioned by the airport operator, Manchester Airport Group..
“The core philosophy behind the design of the terminal building is the desire to return to simplicity of earlier air travel,” ARS wrote. “A core principle of the building was its flow, where passengers could progress through the building from landside to airside, across one public concourse level with constant visibility towards the airfield. This concept would recapture the clarity and simple design of early airfields, with a direct route through the terminal to the aircraft.”
But Foster did not achieve this ideal form for Stansted in a vacuum. Airport terminals were already moving towards the idea of a bright and airy, transparent structure with utilities hidden below.
Both Thomas Fisher in Progressive Architecture in 1991, and Architectural Record in 1987 cite Eero Saarinen’s Dulles terminal (opened 1962) as inspiration for Foster. Fisher also cited Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s Hajj terminal in Jeddah (opened 1981) among further inspiration.
And then there were contemporaries to Stansted that were adopting some of the same design principals. Those include Helmut Jahn’s Chicago O’Hare Terminal 1 (opened 1987), and Gerkan, Marg & Partner’s Stuttgart terminal (opened 1991). The difference with Stansted was Foster located all passenger services on a single level whereas the O’Hare and Stuttgart terminals had multiple levels.
Foster, one could say, perfected a concept in airport architecture with Stansted much like Steve Jobs at Apple did for the digital music player with the iPod.
And Foster definitely helped usher out a, literally, darker era in airport architecture. TRA, Edward DeLorenzo Architect, and Benham Group’s Las Vegas McCarran baggage claim (opened 1985), Scott Brownrigg’s Heathrow Terminal 4 (opened 1986), Gensler’s Los Angeles Terminal 5 (opened 1988), and DWL Architects’ Phoenix Sky Harbor Terminal 4 (opened 1990) immediately come to mind.
“Heavy block-like [airport] terminals became confusing mazes with too few windows, tortuously complicated routes through the buildings, and a total failure to engage with the adventure of flying,” as Daniel Wright put it in a post on Stansted in The Beauty of Transport in 2015.
Put that way, Stansted really was a major turning point in airport design.
“Foster and his colleagues may complain about the potted plants and re-arranged furniture, but the soaring space — up to 11 meters tall above the cabin roofs — is, and will remain, inviolate,” wrote Kenneth Powell in the 1992 monograph Stansted: Norman Foster and the architecture of flight.