THE PAST FUTURES OF - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

LOS FUTUROS PASADOS DE

AEROTROPOLIS

Andrew Witt
Hyojin Kwon

From the Wright Brothers’ first powered flight in 1905 until the
conclusion of World War II, la imaginación popular de mechan-
ical air travel offered a vision of cities and societies transformed
by ubiquitous flight. En 1932, the industrial designer Norman
Bel Geddes predicted air travel would become as routine as a
commuter train trip, with attendant implications for urbanism:
“We can expect the old 5:15 to be a group of ten passenger planes
arriving at minute intervals.”1 The airport was the building type
that embodied and amplified the transformative possibilities of
air travel for the city. During the interwar period a colorful cast
of American architects, developers, and inventors proposed vast
elevated landing platforms surmounting networks of skyscrapers
and enormous mechanical contrivances to launch and land
planes on rooftops. During that period, the airport was a barom-
eter of both technoscientific progress and cultural fantasy, un
infrastructural typology in creative flux. As the airport evolved,
so too did the possibilities of the future city, and in many specu-
lative visions the airport and city fused into a single metropol-
itan organism. En 1939, the designer Nicholas DeSantis coined
an apt term for such an intimate integration of airport and city:
the aerotropolis.2

The airport is an amalgam of three very different elements: el
landscape of runways for the takeoff and landing of aircraft, el
architecture of terminal buildings for the logistics of passenger
and freight transport, and the sundry service structures such
as hangars and fuel depots that support the technical main-
tenance of airplanes. Hoy, the dominant spatial demands
of the runways induce a diffuse horizontal arrangement of all
the other elements, giving the airport a landscape orientation
that Le Corbusier called the “naked” airport.3 Yet an intriguing
genre of the early aerotropolis embraced the opposite arrange-
ment in which all the functions of the airport—airstrips, termi-
nal, and service structures—were consolidated vertically
into a single, tall building sited in the heart of the city that
was often connected directly to rail hubs and auto networks.

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Norman Bel Geddes,
(Bostón: Pequeño,
and Company,

1
Horizons
Marrón,
1932), 80.

2
“Skyscraper Airport for
City of Tomorrow,” Popular
Ciencia 135, No. 5 (Noviembre
1939): 70.

Alastair

3
gordon,
Naked Airport: A Cultural
History of the World’s Most
Revolutionary Structure (Nuevo
york: Metropolitan Books, h.
Holt, 2004), 84.

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HIGO. 1 René Francillon, McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Since 1920: Volume I (Londres: Putnam, 1979), 233.

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The vertical airport proponents asserted the self-evident
logic that to fully realize the potential of passenger flight, el
airport should be at the busiest nexus of urban activity.

During the interwar period, bourgeoning mass media—
specifically periodicals like Popular Mechanics and Popular
Science—played a unique role in diffusing this particular vision
of the airport across the urban core (Higo. 1). These magazines
captured the technical inventions, urban aspirations, and visual
representations of a wide range of speculative airport schemes.
Attending to the content of these magazines uncovers not only
how and why these projects were designed, but also how they
were promoted to a wider public. Here we take these magazines
as our primary source and a key lens through which to understand
the public imagination of the aerotropolis.

Historical schemes that advocated the direct integration of city
and airport prompt reflection on our present in which drone
hives and autonomous aerial deliveries invoke a similar renegoti-
ation of the line between city, sky, and society. The infrastructure
of air travel, long banished to the edge of cities, is being recon-
sidered in an integrally urban context. Uber and Volocopter’s
sky taxis, Amazon’s drone networks, or countless ventures from
air vehicle startups all imagine a city crisscrossed with dense,
local air traffic that echoes the 1920s-era aspirations of ubiqui-
tous and cheap personal air transport. Speculative visions such
as Dezeen’s “Elevation”4 documentary or Liam Young’s “In the
Robot Skies”5 video embrace the possibilities and challenges of
this new aerial urbanism. To be clear, the technologies driving
current innovations—such as electrified engines and multi-rotor
vertical takeoff and landing platforms—are qualitatively differ-
ent than those of a century ago. They herald different forms of
airports as well: more diffuse meshes of small-scale droneports
and taxi stands instead of the sprawling megastructures of past
fantasies. Yet both past and future visions of the aerotropolis
embrace the city itself as a theatre for flight and must reckon
with the spatial and technical challenges that entails.

By the conclusion of World War II, air travel had expanded to
a scale that demanded ever more space for ever larger airliners.
The two-deck Boeing 377, derived from the airframe of the C-97
military transport, was introduced in 1947 and could carry 84
passengers. This nearly tripled the workhorse DC-3’s 32 passen-
ger capacity, pero el 377 also demanded larger-scale airports and
airstrips to accommodate its larger airframe.6 The volume of air
travel grew dramatically, and the demand was not for local urban
travel but rather for long-distance connections to far-flung desti-
naciones. These factors all but ended speculation around central

THE PAST FUTURES OF AEROTROPOLIS

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Elevation, directed by
4
Marcus Fairs and Oliver Manzi
(Dezeen, 2018), www.dezeen.
com/elevation.

5
In the Robot Skies,
directed by Liam Young (Fear
and Wonder, 2018).

René

6
Francillon,
McDonnell Douglas Aircraft
Desde 1920: Volume I (Londres:
Putnam, 1979), 233.

urban airports after World War II. Yet in the early speculations
of the aerotropolis, we see both a generation of airport designs
truly embedded in the heart of the city and a precedent for our
contemporary rethinking of aerial urbanism.

AIRPORT AS SPECULATIVE TYPOLOGY

En los Estados Unidos, the first catalyst for regular air infrastruc-
ture was the promise of quick communication thanks to airmail.
As early as 1910, just seven years after the Wright Brothers’ Kitty
Hawk flight, some form of mail delivery by air was contemplated
at the federal level of the Unites States government, and the first
authorized airmail deliveries began a year later.7 The first aerial
infrastructure was rough and basic. An airfield was precisely
that—vague terrain that might well have otherwise contained
fallow pasture or farmland. It was a distinctly raw and rural
condition suited to the imprecise mechanics of flight itself.

When the airport appeared as an architectural type around 1918,
facilities were crude and many aspects of air infrastructure were
rudimentary and ad hoc. Up until 1925, when the United States
Congress authorized a budget to support an airmail service, el
provisioning of airports in the US was limited almost entirely
to basic airmail infrastructure. In the earliest instances, the few
concessions for passenger accommodation were makeshift hangars
or glorified sheds in remote landing fields. While later passenger
terminals would ultimately look to the precedent of the rail station,
the most critical early planning issues for airports related not to
passenger experience but to the novel operational issues like the
geometry of runway arrangement, the illumination of the fields for
night landings, or the servicing of planes. With no regulations or
best practices, many early facilities were designed in a somewhat
experimental manner. Historian Janet Bednarek observed that after
Primera Guerra Mundial, the “earliest municipal airports grew out of very indi-
vidual experimentation on the part of many cities.”8 In the inter-
war period, the American popular press, particularly the press that
diffused notions of technoscience such as Popular Mechanics and
Ciencia popular, published this airport experimentation. Between
1918 y 1938, aircraft graced the cover of Popular Mechanics no
less than fifty times.9 Some of these stories reveled in the gadgetry
of aeronautics or daring acrobatic feats of flying. Yet many stories
hinted at social changes and a new way of life sparked by cheap
and ubiquitous aircraft whose potential seemed analogous to that
of flying cars. Uno 1931 article proclaimed that the possibilities of
a plane “wonderfully suited to the man of average means … capable
of carrying one to three persons, are almost unlimited.”10 As we
shall see, many contemporary visions of the airport reflected these
aspirations of everyday local and personal flight.

United States Postal
7
Servicio, “Airmail: A Brief
Historia,” March, 2018, https://
about.usps.com/who-we-are/
postal-history/airmail.pdf (acc-
essed Dec. 4, 2021).

8
Janet R. Bednarek,
America’s Airports: Airfield
Desarrollo, 1918–1947
(College Station: Texas A&METRO
Prensa universitaria, 2001), 14.

As counted by the

9
autores.

10
“Wings for Everybody,"
Popular Mechanics, Abril 1931,
546.

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The advent of the airport as a distinct infrastructural type coin-
cided with the accelerating electrification of the United States, como
well as the wider adoption of the wireless communications tech-
nology of radio. As these technologies intersected with the tech-
nical demands of flight, they provoked an array of proposals for
secondary infrastructure to support air travel. With the expanded
use of airplanes, radio towers and communication networks
proliferated to support them. Enormous radio beacons appeared
across cityscapes and countrysides. Electrical lighting, in partic-
ular, was integral to the safety of both those on the ground and
aloft, particularly at night. New ground mobility regimes inter-
wove with the airport to reconfigure the expectations of urban
transport. The advent of the airport thus reverberated across the
new infrastructure networks of the city.

AEROURBANISM: THE AIRPORT AND THE CITY

As the promise of air travel became more apparent, airports inev-
itably gravitated into the orbit of large cities. Researcher Max
Hirsch notes American planner and landscape architect John
Nolen’s influential work of the mid-1920s placed the airport at
the edge of city, integrating it directly into a peripheral infra-
structure of seaplane basins and auto “superhighways.”11 Such
proposals reflected pragmatic tendencies to site airports at the
edges of cities and to connect them to extant ground transport
lines.12 Although a rapid connection to the city center was para-
mount, the airport itself was exiled to the periphery.

Yet there was a different possible future for the airport also
being envisioned in the 1920s and 1930s, one which inserted the
airport directly into the heart of the city. Through a series of
daring unbuilt proposals, architects, engineers, and real estate
developers imagined airports not as broad landscapes but as
urban architecture. Perhaps the best-known version of this
future was Le Corbusier’s 1922 Ville Contemporaine, a city for
three million inhabitants that radiated from a vast transport
complex, complete with an enormous airfield on its roof at its
very center. As evident from Le Corbusier’s drawings of the
scheme, the planes that would land on this central station were
not at the scale of airliners but rather were more at the scale of
small prop planes:

There is only one station. The only place for the station
is in the center of the city …. The station would be an
essentially subterranean building. Its roof, which would
be two stories above the natural ground level of the city,
would form an aerodrome for aero-taxis. This aerodrome
(linked up with the main aerodrome in the protected

THE PAST FUTURES OF AEROTROPOLIS

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11 Max Hirsch, “Develop-
ing successful landside real
estate: An airport urban-
ism approach,” in Journal of
Airport Management 13, No. 2
(2019): 188.

John Zukowsky, ed.
12
"Introducción,"
in Building
for Air Travel: Arquitectura
and design for Commercial
Aviation (Nueva York: Prestel
Verlag, 1996), 13.

HIGO. 2 A rooftop airstrip situated in the center of Manhattan, 1919. From Carl Diensbach, “Roosts for City Airplanes,” The

Popular Science Monthly (Junio 1919).

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HIGO. 3 A rooftop airstrip configured as a circular ring, 1919. From Carl
Diensbach, “Roosts for City Airplanes,” The Popular Science
Monthly (Junio 1919).

zone) must be in close contact with the tubes, el
suburban lines, the main lines, the main arteries and the
administrative services connected with all these.”13

Critic Alastair Gordon, aghast at Le Corbusier’s gesture, argues
that “placing an airport at the city center was a naïve and
dangerous suggestion,” inviting disastrous accidents.14 Yet for
the next two decades an eclectic mix of architects, inventors,
and speculators proposed exactly that, and with considerable
gusto. For all of their pragmatic challenges, central urban airport
schemes resourcefully confronted the technical and spatial diffi-
culties of a compact airport. In their enthusiasm to integrate this
new typology into the city itself, architects and other proponents
proposed locating airports at every level of the city, from above
the rooftops to below the streets and every elevation in between.

Among the boldest early proposals for central urban airports
were those that placed the airport directly atop the roofs of
skyscrapers or astride a series of connected buildings. In these
schemes, the airport landed as the crowning stratum superim-
posed on the city’s existing architecture. En 1919, in one of the
most striking schemes, H.T. Hanson offered the runway as an
annular bridge, a halo hovering atop towers, looming over New
York City below (Figs. 2, 3).15 This ring-shaped airstrip exploited
the advantages of the velodrome, with its canted runway revolv-
ing about an invisible central axis. Using this design, planes
accelerated until they could slingshot into the blue expanse,
or conversely, they could spiral down to a complete stop
when landing. Hanson even proposed that the center could be
an enormous elevator to lift and lower planes to the circular
runway.16 By raising the airport from the ground to perch in the
sky, he connected the city to aerial skyways opposite the emerg-
ing terrestrial highways below.

Other proposals were less geometrically ambitious but retained
the central impulse to build the airport as a roof to the city. Para
instancia, a 1930 proposal adopted technology from aircraft carri-
ers to place a thousand-foot runway above a ten-story airport
terminal (Higo. 4).17 Nueva York, En particular, enjoyed a number
of proposals for prodigious elevated runways. Uno 1929 diseño
called for a landing platform above the Pennsylvania Railroad
Station that would have transformed it into a multimodal mobil-
ity hub (Higo. 5). An enormous airfield surmounted not only the
station itself but extended over buried tracks, creating a vast
landing zone in central Manhattan. Many details echo Antonio
Sant’Elia’s similar 1914 scheme for a combined aerodrome and
rail station. Such schemes cast the airport as simply the latest
and highest layer of urban transport.

THE PAST FUTURES OF AEROTROPOLIS

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13
Le Corbusier, The City
of To-Morrow and its Planning,
trans. Frederick Etchells
(Londres: John Rodker, 1929),
170.

Alastair

14
gordon,
Naked Airport: A Cultural
History of the World’s Most
Revolutionary Structure (Nuevo
york: Metropolitan Books, h.
Holt, 2004), 69.

15
Carl Diensbach, “Roosts
for City Airplanes,” Popular
Ciencia, Junio 1919, 74.

Ibídem.

17
“Scale Model Shows
Plan of Roof-Top Airport,"
Popular Science, Febrero
1930, 55.

Fantastic machinery addressed the challenges of landing in
compact city cores. One daring variant of the rooftop airport
ventured a dramatically inclined mechanical ramp that had the
appearance of a railgun for airplanes (Higo. 6). This enormous,
bridge-scale 210-foot runway could rotate, pivot, and tilt upward
to loft and land planes. According to its inventor, R. James
Gibbons, “It will enable a plane to land or take off in as small a
space as the roof of a skyscraper in a crowded business section—
the incline serving to halt a plane when landing, or to speed its
take-off when departing.”18 Gibbons, a construction contractor
from Brooklyn, Nueva York, was primarily interested in efficiently
moving manufactured goods in and out of dense urban zones.
Yet he saw his contraption as naturally useful for a future of ubiq-
uitous personal air travel, perfect for “the man who lives in the
country and can afford a plane or, para el caso, the man who
lives in the city apartment house and wants a plane to take him
to and from the country for weekend jaunts.”19

Although the rooftop airport had its charms, other design-
ers took a diametrically opposed approach to the siting of the
airport. Instead of raising the airport into the clouds, they buried
it deep beneath the city streets. One inventive example was the
underground airport proposed by self-styled aircraft designer
Dr. William W. Christmas in 1935 (Higo. 7).20 Christmas, a medical
doctor and aeronautical dabbler, enjoyed a rather colorful career
in aircraft design, developing two versions of the appropriately, si
unfortunately, named “Christmas Bullet” airplane that managed
to crash and kill two pilots on their respective maiden flights.21
Christmas returned to aeronautics about a decade later, esta vez
with his airport proposal. In this scheme, planes would land on a
ground-level roof and then descend through a series of ramps to
this compact but systematic multi-layered terminal. The termi-
nal design included connections between the airport and various
ground transportations as well as cargo and postal terminals. Él
seemed ideal for small or even personal planes that were envi-
sioned as a daily mode of transportation as mundane as the car
or the subway.

Between the extremes of the rooftop airport and the under-
ground terminal, some designers proposed towers in which
some or all of the floors were airstrips. Many of these propos-
als hybridized the demands of the airport with existing typol-
ojos, converting cathedrals or office buildings into layered air
garages. In these schemes we also see the common themes of
mechanical contrivances to accommodate the logistics of the
vertical airport and the interest in small-scale personal air travel.
Uno 1927 version of the stacked air terminal was conceived as a
multi-story building where planes can “launch from all floors and

18
“New Flying Field for
Roof Tops,” Popular Science,
Marzo 1929, 53.

“Problem Solution Came
19
in a Dream,” The Brooklyn
Daily Eagle, Junio 10, 1928, 10.

20
“Model Shows Sub-
terranean Airport,” Popular
Ciencia, Abril 1935, 25.

21
Robert J. Neal, A
Técnico & Operational
History of the Liberty Engine
(North Branch, Minnesota: Specialty
Prensa, 2009), 147–149.

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HIGO. 4 From a rooftop airstrip that applied ideas from naval aircraft
carriers. From “Scale Model Shows Plan of Roof-Top Airport,"
Ciencia popular, Febrero 1930.

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HIGO. 5 1929 New York City Airport Concept atop the Pennsylvania Railroad Station. From Smithsonian National Air and Space

Museum Archives, Image number: 9A03965.

THE PAST FUTURES OF AEROTROPOLIS

HIGO. 7 An underground air terminal, with a
landing area on the roof. From “Model
Shows Subterranean Airport,” Popular
Ciencia, Abril 1935. Used with permis-
sion of Popular Science, © 2021. Todo
rights reserved.

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HIGO. 6 An elaborate mechanical airstrip by Dr. William. W.. Christmas
that could be rotated and inclined as necessary. From “New
Flying Field for Roof Tops” Popular Science, Marzo 1929.

taxi up by land or by water” and would be “elevated to the floors
easily on special lifts” (Higo. 8).22 The project had the urban pres-
ence of a large office block rather than anything specifically aero-
nautical. A variant of this idea was architect Norman Weekes’s
1928 vision of Future Airport that imagined the buildings around
Sídney, Australia’s Hyde Park extended into skyscrapers with
hangars and elevated landing strips. Weekes was perhaps best
known for his 1927 scheme to renovate Hyde Park itself, y entonces
his future airport is perhaps a natural extension of that work.
Weekes also embraced a radical future of ubiquitous personal
flight in his airport. According to Weekes, “There will be equal
facility in all large buildings for alighting and ‘checking’ in one’s
moth plane or semi-human wings exactly as one at present does
with one’s hat or umbrella.”23

Architectural competitions created room for architects to embrace
the more visionary implications of the central urban airport. En
1928, the Lehigh Portland Cement Company sponsored a national
competition for new airport designs that generated considerable
interés. Garnering 257 entradas, the competition served as a gauge

“Air Garage to Launch
22
Planes
from All Floors,"
Popular Mechanics, Julio
1927, 33.

23 Norman Weekes,
“Sydney in fifty years time: a
picturesque property,” The
Home 10, No. 1 (Enero
1929): 22–24, 55, 84.

of the architectural imagination at that propitious moment of
early air travel. The competition also attracted attention in the
popular press like Popular Science, which published many of the
designs, trumpeting them as “airports for the future.”24 By the
time of its publication, más que 1,000 airports were already in
operación,25 though organizers noted that “a mere handful were
anything more than flying fields,” consisting merely of graded land
and a few rickety structures.26 The objective of the competition
was to look beyond these makeshift facilities and envision edifices
and landscapes suitable for a revolutionary form of transport.

The jury consisted of a cross-disciplinary range of experts drawn
not only from architecture and engineering but also from aero-
nautics, planificación, and management. This eclectic composi-
tion ensured that pragmatism often prevailed in the judging of
entradas. In addition to suspicion of overlarge or inefficiently sited
buildings, the jury revealed that “it was upon economic grounds
primarily that plans were rejected from the award group.”27
Sin embargo, some marvelously novel proposals were submitted.

Among the most memorable entries was one offered by H.
Altvater of New York, who took the elevated airport to new

Ibídem., 7.

Ibídem., 49.

“Airports

24
el
Future,” Popular Science,
Febrero 1930, 52.

para

Americano

25
Airpor t
Designs (Nueva York: taylor,
Rogers, and Bliss, 1930), 6.

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HIGO. 8 A layered airstrip that allowed planes to land or take off from any level. From “Air Garage to Launch Planes from All

Floors,” Popular Mechanics, Julio 1927.

THE PAST FUTURES OF AEROTROPOLIS

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HIGO. 9 Swarms of aircraft alight from stacked airstrips housed in enormous towers. From Norman Weekes, “Sydney’s future
airport," 1928 / mi. Norsa, 1928, photograph, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Image number: V1/Aer/1.

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THE PAST FUTURES OF AEROTROPOLIS

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HIGO. 10 h. Altvater’s proposal for a rooftop airport submitted to the Lehigh Airports Competition. From American Airport

Designs (Nueva York: taylor, Rogers, and Bliss, 1930).

heights. Resting atop 33 towering skyscrapers, Altvater’s sketch
defines a spoked system of radial runways supported by a bridge-
like substructure (Higo. 10). In this project we see an apotheosis of
many of the trends that defined the earliest futures of the airport:
staggering scale, careful runway geometries, and an assumption of
plentiful but relatively small aircraft. With its bold radial geometry
and massive scale, Altvater’s airport hovered like a cloud above
the modern city.

Of all of these ambitious attempts to place the airport at the core
of the city, among the most bombastic was a vast aerotropolis
billed as New York’s “Dream Airport,” envisioned as an elevated
airfield that covered a sizable chunk of lower Manhattan at a cost
de $3 billion (acerca de $45 billion in 2021 dollars). The flamboyant
New York developer William Zeckendorf proposed the scheme
en 1946, just two years before he would begin a long and famous
collaboration with I.M. Pei. According to Pei’s biographer Carter
Wiseman, Zeckendorf liked “big limousines, big cigars, and big
deals.”28 At the time of the airport proposal, Zeckendorf was
negotiating a massive deal to redevelop what would ultimately
be the site of the UN Headquarters into what he hoped would
be a city within a city. Never one to think small, Zeckendorf took
the same city-in-a-city approach with his airport: it would have
covered 144 blocks twelve stories above ground and would have
been financed by rentals in the solid volume of the aerotropolis
beneath (Figs. 11, 12). As LIFE Magazine reported enthusiastically,
“This airport city would embrace factories, historias, streets, apart-
mentos, warehouses, docks, railroads and steamship terminals.”29
In this last and most megalomaniacal scheme, urban integration
of the airport was complete: the airport and the city were one.

By this time, after the end of World War II, the attention of archi-
tects was already shifting from the fantastic visions of urban
airports to the equally enticing promise of vast new air complexes
on the urban periphery. Air travel became more reliable during
World War II. Global conflict accelerated the routinization of air
travel and standardization of airport infrastructure as the mili-
tary spent heavily on combat and surveillance aircraft operations.
Además, the volume of passenger aircraft flights was exploding,
con 1946 seeing double the passenger-miles of the prior year,
and nearly a sixty-fold increase over fifteen years.30 Designers
had to conceive airports at a scale that was beyond what the
central precincts of any modern city could accommodate. En el
American context, new airports radiated from the edge of the city,
or landed in the hinterlands that offered a buffer for urban expan-
sión. Although the possibility of an urban airport never entirely
disappeared, in the postwar years it was largely relegated to the
realm of fantasy and speculation.

THE PAST FUTURES OF AEROTROPOLIS

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28
Carter Wiseman, I.M.
Pei: A Profile in American
Arquitectura (Nueva York: Harry
norte. Abrams, 1990), 47.

29
Robert Sellmer, "El
Man Who Wants to Build New
York Over,” LIFE Magazine,
Oct 28, 1946, 67.

30
“Air Transport: Facts
and Figures,” Air Trans-
portation Association of
America, 1949.

HIGO. 11 William Zeckendorf’s plan for a three billion-dollar airport stretching over 40 blocks of the Hudson River, 1946. De

“New York City’s Dream Airport,” LIFE Magazine, Marzo 18, 1946.

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THE POSTHUMAN AEROTROPOLIS

Hoy, in a strange echo of Zeckendorf’s
Dream Airport, vast air terminals have
fused with hotels, malls, and entertain-
ment venues to create quasi-urban spaces.
Yet instead of developing as cities in cities,
these new terminal complexes have
almost grown into satellite cities in their
own right. If the former aerotropolis was a
building-as-city, surmounted by an airport,
the aerotropolis now occupies a more
nebulous zone that sprawls across wider
territorio, an urban region with air travel at
its heart.

HIGO. 12 A sectional perspective of the vibrant space imag-
ined under the enormous canopy of a 144-block
airstrip. From “New York City’s Dream Airport,"
LIFE Magazine, Marzo 18, 1946.

Although the speculative airports of
the 1920s and 1930s remained mostly
unbuilt, the aspirations and desires
that they represented have fresh rele-
vance in our own time and may hint
at further transformations of the aero-
tropolis. Hoy, there are affinities
between these schemes and the current
musings around drone and autonomous aerial vehicle tech-
nología. The prevalence of speculation in popular media, el
promises of transformed cities, the interest in smaller-scale
vehicles, and the visions of quotidian air travel all echo the first
golden age of aerial futurism. The boosterism of the past is feel-

ing eerily close to nominally new visions offered for our future:
before and after are converging.

Beyond these echoes, aerial mobility is today being reimag-
ined not only as a conduit to connect to far-flung locales but
also as a local infrastructure of the city itself, energized with
drone delivery routes and rapid air taxi transit. These more agile
and granular air technologies open up a new geometry of the
urban airspace, what geographer Andrew Harris calls volumetric
urbanism.31 In this new conception of urban airspace, the aerial
network entails not only large airports and protected transit
corridors for large jets but also a diffuse system of small-scale
skyways and landing pads that proliferate across rooftops and
façades. Además, the new vision of air travel is no longer exclu-
sively by and for humans. Unmanned aerial vehicles can ferry
cargo and consumer goods across urban skyways autonomously.
Hoy, these ideas of air travel are convolved with notions of the
smart city and the spectrum of autonomous objects that prolif-
erate across land and air. The new aerotropolis is a posthuman
menagerie suspended overhead.

Across a century of sundry mutations, the aerotropolis is again
poised for further transformations in the face of new technolo-
gies. Todavía, as architects dream of the halcyon future of the new
aerotropolis, they would do well to recall the dream airports of
the past. These schemes confronted the daunting challenges of
integrating the technical apparatus of air travel into the metro-
politan fabric and imagined a society with air travel as a daily
reality. To be sure, they were naïve in many respects. Yet beyond
their limitations, the visionary impulses of these early schemes
inspire with their possibilities of air travel and their bold ideas of
what aerial architecture could be in the heart of the city.