Το work with title Post-airports: modern approaches in the reuse of former airports by Antoniou Georgios, Fotopoulos Iason is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
Bibliographic Citation
Georgios Antoniou, Iason Fotopoulos, "Post-airports: modern approaches in the reuse of former airports", Diploma Thesis Project, School of Architectural Engineering, Technical University of Crete, Chania, Greece, 2018
https://doi.org/10.26233/heallink.tuc.79808
Man has dedicated large amounts of time and resources to construct airports. Mountains have been moved, new islands made in the sea, and vast swaths of land have been cleared, all to make the dream of flight possible. The large scale building of international airports and the efforts and investment to make them possible will continue for the foreseeable future as air passenger numbers continue to rise. But what happens when the airport is unused? While designers like Peter Latz have explored the idea of reusing post-industrial landscapes, not much thought has been given to the post-airport condition. The re-use of airports presents unique issues because of their economic importance, role as transportation and infrastructure hubs, enormous buildings, substantial infrastructure and vast spaces. The area of the airport requires special attention and consideration by the designers in order to successfully carry out a strategic plan for the use of such a space. This thesis, therefore, intends to examine the possible re-use of airports with a critical eye, and to answer questions such as:• How is a former airport site treated?• Is such a space an urban vacuum or a space of memory and history?• Is there a way to reuse the site taking into account its previous use as an airport and taking advantage of this capacity to create new productive uses from its existing buildings and infrastructure?• How has the case of Hellenic been addressed so far? Bearing these questions in mind, we conduct a research into the redevelopment of former airports, including the case of the former Airport of Hellinicon, where we are studying how Greece is dealing with the issue of space utilization and the development plan that has been chosen to be implemented.