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When you’re hustling for a gate or a cab, you don’t register the absence of sonic assault, the flooring patterns intended to draw you in the right direction and calm you when you’ve arrived, the extra doses of daylight that make you feel like you’re still on Planet Earth, the iridescent wall of tiles indicating the entrance to a restroom. Most passers-through will never thank the designers or even notice the analgesics. The designers of the new La Guardia have anticipated various forms of travel-related discomfort and tried their best to ease them. Everything was small, old, and barely hanging together.Īll that is gone. A long layover or a canceled flight meant wandering in search of a seat or being rousted from the sticky floor. Arriving passengers stepped into a slough of passageways, low-ceilinged alleys, skinny-people escalators, and halls like feedlots. If you were cutting it close, you jumped out of a cab and joined a line that looked and moved like a giant millipede. The plant was efficient only in the speed with which it inflicted misery. The old La Guardia was, overpoweringly and exhaustingly, neither. They are equal parts factory and clubhouse. The best terminals are high-efficiency people-processing operations and also pleasant places to read, chat, eat, or listen to music. But then every big airport addresses two quasi-opposite conditions: the desire to get in, through, and out at a brisk and unbroken step and the need to linger for hours, even entire days or nights, without triggering a psychotic rage.
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So much deliberate New Yorkiness may be a bit lost on the multitudes who will scramble through these halls, aching to get out of town or back to the real thing. Laura Owens sprinkled a 500-foot mosaic with hometown icons like the Chrysler Building, the Apollo Theater, and subway-station signs. Sarah Sze suspended snapshots of the New York sky on wires, forming an immense yet insubstantial orb. Indoors, artists evoke the city that’s just a traffic jam away. The curved façade turns toward the Manhattan skyline and the afternoon sun. The global megafirm HOK designed Terminal B to provide an only–in–New York experience, but in a good way. Those first impressions - one of character, the other of clarity - combine to express the new building’s ambitions. Alternatively, come in via the front driveway, roll your bag across a wide curbless sidewalk, and you’ll find yourself in a ticketing area that’s clean, bright, airy, and self-explanatory - everything a functional airport should be and La Guardia has not been for decades. Look up, and you see sunshine flowing through a translucent cityscape affixed to the glass façade and cascading on the floor - an artwork by Sabine Hornig. Enter La Guardia Airport’s Terminal B from the side door, next to the parking structure, and you walk down a hallway paved with polychrome light.