Struggle of Airport Terminals to Establish a Relationship with Place: The Case of Esenboğa Airport

Abstract

In the world of today where architecture is accepted as a language imparting meaning and spirit, the rules of this language should be internalized. The communicative character of architecture is underlined through the organic integrity between the form of an architectural product and its meaning in defining the problems arising in the composition and usage of designs in harmony and creating proposals to solve these problems; in short it is emphasized in every step. A closer look at the history of humans and their relation with the environment reveals that depending on the needs and external factors new urban spaces came into existence that underwent, in the course of time, a rapid development and change. New spatial constructs brought to life in modern cities with an ever decreasing sense of locality and variety turn into non-places in time. All of them are of the same type as a system and they do not belong to the place they are in. Airports, one of the most significant examples of “non-places”, carry, beyond the local traits of the country or the region they are located in, the characteristics of the global consumer culture, a phenomenon that is mainly attributed to the social change which occurred in the post-industrial period. Airports, ‘’non-places’’ in essence, are spaces with terminal areas characterised with emptiness. They create, in the rapid flow of time, a sense of emptiness in individuals. This feeling of emptiness is formed by the space design, which one cannot get reference to, which he could not experience before. Airports, which form a reference point for towns, have also become, in recent times, significant spaces in the urban memory. This study aims to investigate the terminal building of Esenboğa Airport, built within the scope of a competitionin terms of spatial context and meaning, with its quality of being a reference point of the city of Ankara, the capital city of Turkey where culture, art and politics are integrated in a pot and also of being the first point where visitors from home and abroad gain the first impression of the city and country. The study only focuses on the terminal building, being the first point of entry into and exit out of the airport where the units serving the arriving and departing passengers are located. Analysing the structure in terms of form and meaning, the study further examines the struggle of airports, as spaces with non-place character, to establish, with their external and internal spatial construct, a relationship with the place.