Kuala Lumpur International Airport, Malaysia
Project type
This prestigious project has allowed the country to restore the national identity it had largely lost in the process of modernisation: the airport is to be expanded considerably over the next fifty years, growing to four times its current size.
The project allows Kurokawa to give full expression to his architectural theories, creating a sequence of spaces formally characterised by their own structures, decorations and roofs.
The airport in its current form consists of three buildings: the Main Terminal Building (MTB) at ground level, hidden behind a screen formed of supporting volumes which had partly been built to the designs of other architects.
The Arrivals Hall is on the lower level, and beyond the Main Terminal Building is the Contact Pier (CP) for short flights and local traffic.
A shuttle train takes passengers to the cross-shaped Satellite; in the future a second satellite will increase the airport's capacity to 45 million passengers a year (it is now 28 million).
The entire airport will then be doubled in a mirror construction covering a total of 10 x 10 kilometres to further increase capacity to 80 million passengers.
Passenger routes are quite traditional: in the MTB, built on a 38.4-metre square grid, priority is given to departures rather than arrivals, the number of which is not very large.
The two flows could have been better integrated to the benefit of both. In the Contact Pier and the Satellite, organised along the same lines, the flows are successfully overlapped, even where domestic and international flights lie on different levels.
The many visitors who come to Malaysia's airport to welcome friends and relatives cross the centre of the airport, enjoying spectacular views over the runways.
In this project Kurokawa expresses his philosophical conviction that nature, architecture and culture are expressions of a single phenomenon, harmoniously united by geometry.
His treatises are an enquiry into abstraction, fragmentation, discontinuity and asymmetry; architecture must reflect the world we live in and become a synthesis of all the cultures present on earth.
Kurokawa has designed an international airport using fragments of traditional Malaysian architecture: he masterfully carves totems and hollows out spaces, modelling them all with plastic force.
The architect emphasises the concept of metamorphosis, a characteristic of nature appearing in every element of this work.
Grandiose pyramids form the roof of the Departure Hall, offering views in different directions, following the diagonal at 45°.
Zig-zag paths wind among the truncated cone-shaped pillars, and their depths create an optical illusion in the eye of the observer. In the Contact Pier and the Satellite the structure loses its linearity, and its branches support the oblique roof: it is as if one is walking through a forest of architecture, where shoots sprout out of the floor, light falls from above and the ceilings look like fronds blowing in the wind.
Nature appears among the cement runways and under the control tower, not just as a metaphor but as a real presence, emphasising the ecological issue.
The large number of curves gives rise to a series of angles in a Baroque kind of geometry based on progressive dilations and contractions.
This naturalistic landscape is the product of a fertile imagination which makes dynamic use of the metamorphoses of architectonic figures on the one hand, while employing all the precision of technique and design on the other.
Looking out through the oblique glass walls of the three buildings, the visitor sees huge wooded areas occupying the central zone between the Main Terminal Building and the Contact Pier: even though inaccessible, these spaces give the interiors an almost surreal value, giving the airport a completely different look from what we are used to.
Floriana De Rosa
Link: http://www.kisho.co.jp/WorksAndProjects/Works/klia/
