One of the Most Beautiful Airport Terminals Ever Built Is Being Preserved as a Hotel

The 1960s were a tumultuous decade–but by most accounts, they were a golden age for air travel. The TWA Terminal at JFK, opened in 1962, is a perfect example of that bygone era, but the midcentury masterpiece has sat empty for more than a decade. Now, it will be reborn.

After almost 15 years of disuse, today Crain’s New York reports today that the Port Authority, which controls the building, has finally officially chosen a proposal from Jet Blue to turn the building into a hotel. Their proposal was given support this summer by Governor Cuomo, and now looks as though it’s being given the final OK by Port Authority.
Right now, design details are thin, but we already know hotel will have 505 rooms as well as 40,000 feet of meeting space and as many as eight restaurants inside the 1962 building. Crowning it will be a 10,000-foot observation deck overlooking the runway.

Architects, historians, and New Yorkers in general have fought for years to protect the building and make certain that its future use doesn’t ruin the original architecture. It’s hard to imagine being sincerely excited by an airport these days, but the TWA Terminal, designed by the Finnish-born architect Eero Saarinen, was one of those buildings. It was a wonder of technology–from its architecture to its systems.



Corbin Keech/Flickr CC; The Terminal circa 1962. Hulton Archive/Getty Images.
First there was the roof, a groundbreaking structure itself, composed of four counterbalanced shells made of thin concrete, each poured over the course of several 30 hour sessions. It looked like a bird taking flight, and it was absolutely radical for its time. The critic Ada Louise Huxtable called it “a definitive and awesome statement of the almost anarchic release of architecture from familiar forms and techniques” in an obituary of Saarinen The New York Times, published a year before the building opened.

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