Amid the sprawling infrastructure of JFK Airport, the resurrection of Eero Saarinen’s 1962 TWA Flight Center in New York as the nucleus of the TWA Hotel offers a masterclass in architectural resurrection.
This is no mere exercise in nostalgia, but a layered palimpsest where Jet Age bravado intersects with the demands of contemporary hospitality. Spearheaded by Beyer Blinder Belle with new interventions by Lubrano Ciavarra and INC Architecture & Design, the project confronts a fundamental dilemma of adaptive reuse: how to preserve a mythic aesthetic while injecting the functional elasticity required by a 21st-century hotel.
Saarinen’s original terminal—its sinuous concrete curves and kaleidoscope of crimson and white tiles—embodied a rhapsodic vision of air travel, one that quickly became obsolete in the age of jumbo jets. Now, through painstaking restoration down to the penny tiles and split-flap boards, it serves as the dramatic lobby to an entirely new spatial experience. Where passengers once rushed through check-ins, guests now linger over cocktails and Jean-Georges' cuisine, underscoring a poetic inversion: movement transmuted into stillness, urgency into reverie.
The two new guestroom wings, tactfully hidden behind the terminal’s rear flanks, manage to shield the view from the surrounding airport sprawl while avoiding overt mimicry. Inside, mid-century cues—walnut paneling, womb chairs, aviation ephemera—compose a kind of cinematic time capsule. Yet this is no themed experience; rather, it is an ambient reenactment of the period’s spatial imagination, tuned finely by Stonehill Taylor to Saarinen’s modernist frequencies. The integration of the subterranean conference center by INC—sheathed in brass, terrazzo, and hardwoods—offers a quieter, more measured counterpoint to the terminal's ebullience.
Still, the architectural poetry must contend with the practical. The once-iconic tarmac window now stares toward an access road, a stark reminder that context has shifted. And though the red-carpeted tubes remain, they now lead not to departure gates, but to hotel rooms and rooftop pools. This transformation, while visually seamless, prompts an uneasy question: in becoming timeless, has the building relinquished its original purpose? Or has it simply been reborn with a different kind of gravity—no longer a springboard to the skies, but a monument to the golden myth of flight?
The TWA Hotel, then, is both elegy and rebirth. It preserves the architecture not only in form, but in atmosphere and aspiration. This project does more than bridge eras; it stages a dialogue between preservation and invention, between Saarinen’s futurism and our own uncertain present.
