Like many people, I travel quite a bit. I need to. And like many people, I’ve come to take distances for granted. However, I also must admit this: I dread air travel and used to feel that a trip to the airport was like a trip to the dentist. But I recently wrote a book on the subject ( Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Revolutionary Structure ), and my feelings changed. Because whatever we may think of airports as public spaces, they are an edgy kind of frontier, where boredom, technology, surveillance and mobility come together in a heady mix that is truly modern. From its earliest days, the story of the airport has been a recurrent cycle of anticipation and disappointment, success and failure, innovation and obsolescence. It is a case of architecture (a slow art) trying to catch up with the latest in aviation technology (a fast art).

Designing an airport is, at best, a compromise between the practical and the prophetic. The changes in commercial aviation have been relentless as each new generation of airplane – from the Ford Trimotor to the recently unveiled Airbus A380 – has brought a new theory about how an airport should be designed.

As a result, air terminals have evolved an ad hoc style that is oddly splayed with a multitude of telescoping Jetways and spindly arms that reach out and intersect with pod-shaped satellites, multilevel parking structures and elevated walkways. English design critic Reyner Banham accurately compared the modern airport landscape to a “demented amoeba.”