Los Angeles International Airport

• Los Angeles International Airport (IATA: LAX, ICAO: KLAX, FAA LID: LAX) is the primary airport serving the Greater Los Angeles Area, the second-most populated metropolitan area in the United States. It is most often referred to by its IATA airport code LAX, with the letters pronounced individually. LAX is located in south western Los Angeles along the Pacific coast in the neighbourhood of Westchester, 16 miles (26 km) from Downtown Los Angeles. It is owned and operated by Los Angeles World Airports, an agency of the Los Angeles city government formerly known as the Department of Airports.

Architects

Charles Luckman and William Pereira

HISTORY

• In 1928, the Los Angeles City Council selected 640 acres (1.00 sq mi; 260 ha) in the southern part of Westchester as the site of a new airport for the city. The fields of wheat, barley and lima beans were converted into dirt landing strips without any terminal buildings. It was named Mines Field .

• Mines Field was opened as the airport of Los Angeles in 1930, and the city purchased it to be a municipal airfield in 1937. The name was changed to Los Angeles Airport in 1941 and to Los Angeles International Airport in 1949.

• In 1958, the architecture firm Pereira & Luckman was contracted to plan the re-design of the airport for the "jet age". The plan, developed with architects WeltonBecket and Paul Williams , called for a series of terminals and parking structures in the central portion of the property, with these buildings connected at the centerby a huge steel-and-glass dome. The plan was never realized and the Theme Building was built on the site intended for the dome.

Use of vent blocks in external peripheral wall of theme building

Theme Building

The distinctive white googie “ Theme Building", designed by Pereira & Luckman architect Paul Williams and constructed in 1961 by Robert E. McKee Construction Co., resembles a flying saucer that has landed on its four legs. A restaurant with a sweeping view of the airport is suspended beneath two arches that form the legs. The Los Angeles City Council designated the building a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument in 1992. A $4 million renovation, with retro-futuristicinterior and electric lighting designed by Walt Disney Imagineering, was completed before the "Encounter Restaurant" opened there in 1997. Visitors are able to take the elevator up to the roof of the "Theme Building", which closed after the September 11 attacks for security reasons and reopened to the public on weekends beginning on July 10, 2010. Additionally, a memorial to the victims of September 11, 2001 is also located on the grounds of the Theme Building, as three of the four hijacked planes were originally destined for LAX that day.

Retro-futuristic ArchitectureRetro-futurism incorporates two overlapping trends which may be summarized as the future as seen from the past and the past as seen from the future.• The first trend, retro-futurism proper, is directly inspired by the imagined

future which existed in the minds of writers, artists, and filmmakers in the pre-1960 period who attempted to predict the future, either in serious projections of existing technology (e.g. in magazines like Science and Invention) or in science fiction novels and stories. Such futuristic visions are refurbished and updated for the present, and offer a nostalgic, counterfactual image of what the future might have been, but is not.

• The second trend is the inverse of the first: futuristic retro. It starts with the retro appeal of old styles of art, clothing, mores, and then grafts modern or futuristic technologies onto it, creating a mélange of past, present, and future elements. Steampunk, a term applying both to the retrojection of futuristic technology into an alternative Victorian age, and the application of neo-Victorian styles to modern technology, is a highly successful version of this second trend.

Images from Retro futuristic comics

The Theme Building at Los Angeles International Airport resembles a landed spacecraft.

The upper portion of the building is not intended to be integrated withthe building but rather to appear as a separate object—a huge flying

Saucer -like space ship only incidentally attached to a conventional building. This appears intended not to evoke an even remotely possible future, but rather a past imagination of that future, or a reembracing of the futuristic vision ofGoogie architecture.

Googie or Populuxe architecture

• Googie architecture is a form of modern architecture, a subdivision of futurist architecture influenced by car culture , jets , the Space Age , and the Atomic Age. Originating in Southern California during the late 1940s and continuing approximately into the mid-1960s, Googie-themed architecture was popular among motels, coffee houses and gas stations. Features of Googie include upswept roofs, curvaceous, geometric shapes, and bold use of glass , steel and neon . Googie was also characterized by Space Age designs symbolic of motion, such as boomerangs, flying saucers , atoms and parabolas , and free-form designs such as "soft" parallelograms and an artist's palette motif. These stylistic conventions represented American society's fascination with Space Age themes and marketing emphasis on futuristic designs.

• LAX has nine passenger terminals arranged in a "U", also called a "horseshoe". The terminals are served by a shuttle bus. Terminals 5, 6, 7 and 8 are all connected airside via an underground tunnel between Terminals 5 and 6 and above-ground walkways between Terminals 6, 7 and 8. There are no physical airside connections between any of the other terminals, although an airside shuttle bus operates between Terminals 4, 6 and the American Eagle remote terminal.

• In addition to these terminals, there are 2,000,000 square feet (190,000 m2) of cargo facilities at LAX, and a heliport operated by Bravo Aviation. Qantas has a maintenance facility at LAX even though it is not a hub.

Interior view of the terminal 4

Tom Bradley International Terminal

The Tom Bradley International Terminal (TBIT) has 12 gates, including six on the north concourse and six on the south concourse. In addition, there are nine satellite gates for international flights located on the west side of LAX. Passengers are ferried to the west side gates by bus. The terminal hosts most of the major international airlines, with the exception of those housed in Terminal 2

Interior of Tom Bradley International Terminal in early morning

Check-in counters in the Tom Bradley International Terminal.

Moving walkways inside the new south concourse of the Tom Bradley West terminal.A separated arrivals walkway can be seen on the upper left and in the background,which leads directly to US Customs .

The Theme Building decorated with light displays for the Christmas season

Aerial view

Interior views

Thank you

- By Dhruv BansalMadhav SinghB.Arch 4th Year