If you think you know how to complain about airports, just listen to Benjamin Bratton’s beatnik spoken-word fugue of polysyllables. “The airport is where the birth pangs of the Stack, the armature of planetary computation, are felt most viscerally,” the philosopher said at a fancy conference on airport architecture in Los Angeles a few weeks back. “Long ago, the ceremonial interface to the city may have been a gateway or bridge…. Now the airport is the interface to the city and nation-state.”

It’s an entry point marked by “the flattening affectless provisionality of boarding-lounge culture” and “that omnipresent media-and-candy matrix” built inside “this critical cohabitation of security and entertainment…. It is where police deep-scan your person while blending you a delicious smoothie, without irony or affect.”

Or as a two-bit standup comic might say: Airports, right? I mean.

But seriously, folks. As cities from Singapore to Los Angeles to Kutaisi, Georgia, are building more and bigger terminals for more and more money, the vexing problem of airports, how do they work even has taken on a new character. Designers, architects, urbanists, artists, security specialists, logistics experts, and retail planners have all buckled into the airport-making cockpit, just in time for a full-on identity crisis. It was the common thread connecting the speakers at the Aerial Futures: Leading Edge symposium.

Airports today are supposed to help move people onto and off of planes, but they’re also supposed to retain people for indefinite periods of time and ply them with entertainment—food, shopping, and so on. They’re supposed to be welcoming symbols of nations and cities, but also serve as intentional choke points for the security state. And they’re supposed to evoke the grand symbols of aviation’s golden age for pennies on the dollar.

See? Identity crisis.

“The airports in the world that are leading-edge, that people find pleasant to fly through and enjoy being at, are places like Incheon in South Korea, Changi in Singapore, Hong Kong International,” says Max Hirsh, an urban theorist at the University of Hong Kong and author of Airport Urbanism, when I call him after the conference. “Those countries recognize that the airport and the airlines are part of their brand.”

And sure, Changi has fun places for kids to hang out, interesting shopping, and is building a 90-foot-tall indoor vortex waterfall. Hong Kong has an Imax theater. These Asian mega-airports even bring in people who aren’t flying anywhere. As Hirsh points out, the side of Singapore where Changi sits doesn’t have much else in the way of large, air-conditioned open space. So of course people get married there.

But what about something home-grown? Like ... the relatively new International Terminal in Los Angeles?

Part of the Aerial Futures conference was a tour of the $2.1 billion terminal, which opened in 2015. That included the steel skeleton of its $1.6 billion extension on the other side of the tarmac; a long tunnel will connect it to the existing bit. (Under-tarmac tunnels have long been a way for airports to distinguish themselves; O’Hare’s is the colorful classic.)

In LA, passengers enter the new terminal via a claustrophobic TSA neckdown, then cross through a window-lined atrium and into a vaulted space centered around a huge, pixel-covered spire that plays bespoke movies. Giant screens are everywhere in the space, which also features the complement of high-end boutique shops you might expect, and a food court.

“I think this building type is going to be the most important type of public architecture in the 21st century,” said the terminal’s architect, Curtis Fentress, at the conference. “Some of the spaces that were created here are making [the experience of a terminal] much better for people.”