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ETD Abstract Container

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Taking Back the Tarmac: Re-Use of Airport Infrastructure

D'Andrea, Francis D.
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1367936661

Abstract Details

2013, MARCH, University of Cincinnati, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning: Architecture.
Man has dedicated large amounts of time and resources to construct airports. Mountains have been moved, new islands made in the sea, and vast swaths of land have been cleared all to make the dream of flight possible. The large scale building of international airports and the efforts and investment to make them possible will continue for the foreseeable future as air passenger numbers continue to rise. But what happens when the airport is unused? The default answer seems to be to clear the site and redevelop on a tabula rasa. The history of the site is ignored and the building stock and infrastructure carelessly demolished to make way for new development. While designers like Peter Latz have explored the idea of reusing post-industrial landscapes like steel plants while preserving their infrastructure, not much thought has been given to the post-airport condition. The re-use of airports presents unique issues because of their economic importance, role as transportation and infrastructure hubs, enormous buildings, substantial infrastructure and vast spaces. The current pattern of completely wiping away the airport and starting over from scratch is broken. The airport requires special attention and consideration from designers in order to successfully deal with the aforementioned issues. This thesis, then, intends to look at the potential re-use of airports in a critical manner, with an eye to the question: is there a better way to reuse the airport? Is there a way to re-use it that takes into account its former use as an airport and plays off these qualities to make new productive uses out of its buildings and infrastructure? Can the nature of an airport as both a "non-place" and "two-dimensional facsimiles of modern cities" be used to inform and enrich the reuse of the airport? With these questions in mind, Chicago's Midway International Airport was chosen as a testing ground. While it is still in use, for the purposes of this thesis, it is presumed to be unused. The thesis will attempt to repurpose the entirety of the airport: master planning the entire site with a park and city and looking at the repurposing of a portion of the terminal by reusing it as an economic incubator.
Michael McInturf, M.Arch (Committee Chair)
Aarati Kanekar, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
97 p.
Architecture
Airports; Midway; Re-use; Masterplan; Urban; Park;

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • D'Andrea, F. D. (2013). Taking Back the Tarmac: Re-Use of Airport Infrastructure [Master's thesis, University of Cincinnati]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1367936661

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • D'Andrea, Francis. Taking Back the Tarmac: Re-Use of Airport Infrastructure. 2013. University of Cincinnati, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1367936661.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • D'Andrea, Francis. "Taking Back the Tarmac: Re-Use of Airport Infrastructure." Master's thesis, University of Cincinnati, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1367936661

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ucin1367936661
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© 2013, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License Taking Back the Tarmac: Re-Use of Airport Infrastructure by Francis D. D'Andrea is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by University of Cincinnati and OhioLINK.