Air terminals had been swamped in the travel boom that followed World War II. It took more than a decade to catch up, just in time to meet the arrival of the first jet airliners, the DC-7, Boeing 707 and British-made Comet. Air travel was, for a brief but shining moment, sophisticated and cool during the jet-set era, when fashionable socialites winged their way to Paris for an opening at the Louvre and back to New York the next day for a Park Avenue soirée. Sexy stewardesses wore outfits by Emilio Pucci, and airlines built daring expressionist buildings like Eero Saarinen’s birdlike terminal at JFK (New York) or Minoru Yamasaki’s soaring vaulted roofs at STL (St. Louis). It seemed as if the airport had finally found its true form.

Then, in 1970, the Boeing 747 jumbo jet ushered in the age of mass air travel. Just when planners had figured out how to accommodate the first generation of jet airliners, along came a 70-metre monster that demanded new solutions and bigger terminals. Much of the intimacy and sense of style was lost as fast-food courts replaced martini-modern cocktail lounges. Then, along came terrorism concerns, and the equation changed yet again. The first security screening devices were introduced in the early 1970s; concrete fortresses replaced the sleek glass terminals of the 1960s.

A new set of issues emerged (in the U.S. and Canada, at least) with the American Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, when airports were obliged to adapt overnight to the pressures of hub and spoke scheduling and an increase in inter-airport transfers. New airport construction in North America slowed to a trickle in the 1980s and 1990s, but a big internal change came about with the transformation of the departure lounge into a high-end shopping mall. Retailers recognized the profit potential of passengers locked in transit and eager to spend. To describe the phenomenon, business and design consultants even coined the term “transumers” for these consumers in transit.