Due to the latest global restrictions on air travel, this month's review will lovingly and nostalgically explore the world of airline and airport design.
AIRLINE: Style at 30,000 feet (Keith Lovegrove, 2013)
Divided into four sections covering fashion, food, interior design, and identity, Airline shows how airborne culture has changed through history. The author, designer Keith Lovegrove, also comments on air travel from a cultural, technical and social point of view, thus providing a wider perspective for design trends and decisions.
Buy the book here.
AIRLINE VISUAL IDENTITY - 1945-1975 (M. C. Huhne, 2015)
This book documents the development of the visual identities of thirteen pioneering airlines, combining research with hundreds of aviation posters, photos and other illustrations. The book provides unique insight into the design and advertising methods of an era, conceived by some of the best creative minds of the time, such as Massimo Vignelli, Otl Aicher, Academy Award winner Saul Bass, Ivan Chermayeff or advertising titan Mary Wells Lawrence.
Buy the book here.
ARRIVALS AND DEPARTURES: The Airport Pictures of Garry Winogrand (D.A.P., 2004)
Photographer Garry Winogrand is known for his street photography, through which he portrayed U.S. life and its social issues. His airport photographs were taken over a period of 25 years, with the first frame shot around 1958 and the last in 1983, just months before his death. In them he captures, with humor and humanity, the bustle and energy of air travel, in moments oscillating between monotony and heightened emotions.
Buy the book here.
AIRPORTS: A Century of Architecture (Hugh Pearman, 2004)
Since their emergence at the start of the 20th century, airports have become one of the most distinctive and important of architectural building types. Often used to symbolize progress, freedom and trade, they offer architects the chance to design on a grand scale. At the beginning of the 21st century, airports are experiencing a new and exciting renaissance as they adapt and evolve into a new type of building; one that is complete, self-contained, adaptable and catering to a new range of demands.
The book celebrates the most important airport designs in the world. Beginning with an exploration of the first structures of aviation, and early designs such as the Berlin Tempelhof, the book explores the key airports of the century up to the present day, including Eero Saarinen's TWA Terminal in New York, Renzo Piano's Kansai Airport and Norman Foster's Chek Lap Kok in Hong Kong.
Buy the book here.
DESIGNING TWA: Eero Saarinen's Airport Terminal in New York (Kornel Ringli, 2015)
Buy the book here.
HARRY GRUYAERT: Last Call (Thames & Hudson, 2020)
Magnum photographer Harry Gruyaert‘s embrace of color photography set him ahead of many contemporaries in Europe at a time when the medium was widely seen as most applicable to the realm of commercial and advertising photography.
In his latest book, Last Call, he brings together his images made in airports around the world. They are, he writes, spaces “with a host of players gliding through as though they’re on a stage". Gruyaert searches for texture, light, colour and architecture of angles and reflections “that make you lose your bearings and create a very strong impression of being caught between two worlds”.