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With almost two generations of air travel behind us we affect to hate airports. Actually many of us love them; I love submitting in turn to the importunities of check in, security check, passport control; I love the pseudo-needs of duty-free (seemingly so money free! What is it in the air that banknotes, creased with the rigours of their earning, should turn to confetti?)
…and then (swinging your Camels in a plastic bag, physically, existentially as free as it is possible to be) undulating semi-corporeally down the rubber walkway to Gate 63.

How beautiful airports are. The sun always shines so richly through the tinted glass of airports; but the glass is never only transparent. It is a palimpsest of data: the fuselage of a 747 outside taxies eerily through a mesh of lights, shadows, reflections, neon signs in reverse. So illusory, so confusing! Again, an attrition of certainty in all the senses.

Outside, though, incontrovertibly physical things take place. The dramatic, (and the slower, the more dramatic) movement of he biggest, most beautiful sculptures in the world (though Kapoor's sculpture, Maryas, at present in Tate Modern, is three times as big and almost as beautiful!)

I celebrated the millennium by specifically requesting two very special airport stopovers; witty post-modern tourism indeed, I thought cockily, having as my destination just the airports rather than the cities themselves! But I didn't think
that for long when I realised of course that I had been beaten at that little game; for there are already (how could it be otherwise?) airport buffs; not plane buffs but airport buffs , who spend time and money on visiting airports, disdaining that merest of adjuncts, the actual city that lies somewhere beyond the Arrivals gate.

In the last year I have spent time, much more time than necessary, in Kuala Lumpur International, the new HK airport Chek Lap Kok by Foster; and the great Osaka airport Kansai International by Renzo Piano. The KL and HK airports are spectacular. Kuala Lumpur has a shimmery, jungly atmosphere; great green roofs, massive glass vaulting. Foster's Chek Lap Kok airport at Hong Kong is cooler, austerer, more steely. This airport can hardly be mentioned without a nostalgic thought for Kai Tak, the most impudently-sited airport in the world, practically in the middle of HK, where the 747s lumbered in onto a stumpy runway on a very short leash indeed. Dramatic, scary, but it had to go and this is a sumptuous replacement; oh how many hundreds of metres of shimmering walkways, of tinted glass! And outside great deserts of tarmac, so vast a space to play with that the planes appear to be barely marshalled into order, rather scattered here and there, as if someone's toys had not been put away before bedtime. And beyond, across the sea, those steep, slightly improbable looking mountains that you get in the South China Sea.

   
 

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