Design: Take It From The Top
Excavation has begun. There are fluorescent orange flags and bulldozers pushing up mounds of earth, making way for the new access road and parking lot. But what about the terminal? The tempest-in-a-teapot terminal?
Yes, the old one's still there, barely noticeable behind some ugly new hangars - even more dilapidated than I remembered: its asphalt shingles curling up like old blue corn chips, the roof sagging, the wood rotten. Inside waits Pat Ryan, perhaps the most patient airport manager in America, while out on the apron sits a gold-tinted Lear jet ready to whisk some Mandarin back to New York. What a strange contrast.
It's been a long wait, but now the ground is rumbling and the clouds are building up over the western horizon. Soon the foundations will be poured and the shiny new terminal will rise from the ashes of oblivion. But what will the new terminal look like? It's hard to say exactly.
Beach House
I've just come over from Town Hall where I looked at a set of plans by the architect Robert Lund. The elevations show a familiar-looking building - wood framed and covered in vertical cedar siding. It has the feel and layout of a summer beach house, wraparound porches and pitched roofs, like one of those on the dunes in Bridgehampton or back in the potato fields of Sagaponack.
In fact, it looks like some of the summer homes that Mr. Lund has designed in those places. But, no, this is not a weekend house on the bay. I keep forgetting. This is an airport terminal. Let me explain.
The thing is, airports make people nervous. They always have. For me, it started with a casual aside from Supervisor Judith Hope back in 1987. "Why don't you get some architect to design us an airport?" she asked. I was interested at the time in getting local architects to design a new post office.
Competition
But eventually, when Tony Bullock took over as Supervisor, the Town Board agreed to help sponsor a design competition for a new terminal that would be paid for, in large part, by the Federal Aviation Administration. Working closely with Councilman Pat Trunzo and other town officials, I wrote up a competition program in the spring of 1989. At first we thought we'd only get a dozen or so architects, but we ended up receiving over 100 entries from all around the country and even some from Europe.
What happened then is a story that has been told, and retold. The jury met on June 17 at Guild Hall and five finalists were selected. We had put out an open call for ideas and come up with five of the best. The Town Board was then to choose the one to be built. But there were rumblings as soon as the jury convened. Not everyone was happy with the results. The finalists were "too modernistic," "too avant-garde," the jury was "rigged," et cetera.
Suddenly the East Hampton Airport was a big deal, and The New York Times did a story and then New York magazine and a lot of others. All the leading architecture magazines ran stories. The cat was out of the bag. From then on everything went gaga.
The Polish novelist Milan Kundera used the expression "moral judo" in a recent novel. In moral judo the opponents try to out-embarrass one another by publicly accusing the others of politically incorrect behavior.
The airport competition quickly degenerated into a Hamptons version of moral judo.
At an official presentation in July, in the basement of the Bridgehampton Community House, the winning designs were thrown out. The terminal had to be something cozy, something old and worn and traditional, something hard to put your finger on. "Traditional" took on the moral equivalence of, say, crusty French bread or fresh arugula.
"What," the members of the judging panel asked, "does a 'traditional' airport look like?" Town Board members shrugged, paused, became contemplative. The airport should be a gateway to all that was good and true in the East Hampton of imagination, something in keeping with that endless parade of faux shingle style houses on beach and dune, in ticky woods and potato fields, that began sprouting in the Boesky era and still persist as the preferred style for all leveraged buyout wannabes.
The style was comprised of: a) at least one cupola, b) at least one "palladia" window in the shape of a Mercedes Benz insignia, c) several Doric columns with vacuum-formed capitals, d) some trellis with creeping vines, all surrounded by a garden of exotic grasses and high maintenance perennials. It didn't seem to matter that all of those things were expensive, impractical, and high maintenance, and may not have been the most important priorities at an airport where the safe landing of airplanes usually gets precedence.
Perpetuating An Image
The East End's real estate cartel saw it in its best interests to have a traditional Martha Stewart-looking airport that would suit the expectations of their ultra-rich clients and help perpetuate the image of a bucolic, fairytale village in which the sins of greed could be assuaged by a generous dose of architectural quaintness.
Local taxpayers didn't want to pay a penny for a facility that most of them would never use. Then there were those who didn't want an airport at all and saw a juicy opportunity to have the whole thing closed down.
The tiny terminal became a micro-myth of Hamptons angst. It was us versus them. Town officials played the innocent victims, while those involved in the competition were called arrogant "outsiders."
Dagger-Like Design?
I had moved here as a baby in 1953 when my father took over as pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Amagansett, and many of the architects in the competition were longtime residents, including the finalists, Smith and Thompson, but that didn't matter. That wasn't pertinent in the Hamptons version of moral judo. It sounded better if all architects and organizers were avant-garde outsiders standing like Godzilla with T-square and CAD software in paw, looming above the Shinnecock Canal, ready to move east and cover the place with steel and glass angles.
Town Councilman Tom Ruhle was quoted in this newspaper as boasting that "the only architect I know is Stanford White, and he's dead" (The Star, July 13, 1989). Another official was quoted as saying that "a cutting-edge design was being inflicted" on the town, further establishing the town's victimhood while underlining the painful sharpness of our dagger-like designs.
To Be Continued
Alastair Gordon, who divides his time between Princeton, N.J., and Amagansett, was The Star's design columnist from 1984 to 1990. He rejoins our list of writers with this piece. Part two of this article will look at the current architectural plans for the terminal building.