Designed by Eero Saarinen, the TWA Flight Center, or JFK Terminal 5, remains the world’s most compelling and photogenic airport building. Sensuous, cinematic and an utter delight to the roving eye, it survives – all swooping lines and lightweight concrete – to evoke the excitement of the early Jet Age. It has however been cut down to size. Although declared a Historical Landmark of New York City in 1994 and placed on the National Register of Historic Places 11 years later, only the core of the terminal survives. Encompassed since 2008 by a new Terminal 5 designed by Gensler architects and serving the airline JetBlue, Saarinen’s gem fails to shine as it should today. Not only have its wings been clipped, but plans to turn the bird-shaped building into a conference centre, restaurant or hotel have all fallen by the way.

The latest, by the Budapest-born hotelier André Balazs, would have seen the Saarinen-designed terminal re-open as the spectacular lobby of a 150-room hotel. A listed historic monument that played fly-in parts in ABC TV’s Pan Am and Catch Me If You Can, Hollywood’s take on the life of the brilliant con man Frank Abagnale, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, the TWA Flight Center will survive even if it is some while yet before all parties can agree on what best to do with it.

Meanwhile, the equally fine, although often underrated Terminal 6 at JFK has been demolished. The building was opened in 1969 and designed by IM Pei, the Chinese-American architect whose Glass Pyramid is much admired by millions of visitors to the Louvre from around the world. Marketed by National Airlines as the ‘Sundrome’, this light, elegant, calming and transparent building was a subtle riposte to Saarinen’s swooping Terminal 5.

It was an elegant modern pavilion, nothing more or less than a great horizontal steel truss – its roof – held up by 16 cylindrical concrete columns, with wrap-around floor-to-ceiling panels of sheer glass. Perhaps the ‘Sundrome’ was too modest, and although it had the virtue of passengers being able to see right through it from entrance to aircraft, it was not a place for the kind of shiny shops and temporary food-stalls that define the latest mass-transit terminals where the very notion of repose is traduced at every possible commercial twist and turn.

Soaring again

Smaller and older airport buildings have fared much better than Saarinen’s and Pei’s. Dating from 1939, the delightful Terminal A at Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport, closed in 2010. It has since been moved, by trailer, 230-metres southeast from its original plot and turned into an aviation museum, restaurant, events space and area for private pilots.