Video: 50 Years of Airport Evolution From the Field’s Leading Architect

French architect and airport designer Paul Andreu responsible for, among many other creations, creating Paris’ Charles de Gaulle, joined Alastair Gordon at the Harvard Graduate School of Design earlier this month to discuss the evolution of airports over the past fifty years.

In the video of the lecture, Andreu takes us through a tour of the world reviewing his many iconic airport projects and sharing the unique challenges of merging the needs of aviation with the local landscape and surrounding communities.

Andreu emphasizes the importance of making airports easy for passengers to navigate and of incorporating green spaces in the terminals, though he also proposes that a structural landscape can be created by the incorporation of roads, as with his creation at Charles de Gaulle.

For fans of aviation and of architecture alike, this is a sublime way to spend just over an hour. It is also a wonderful opportunity for airports everywhere to find inspiration as they grow and develop tomorrow’s airport cities.