 Ms. Jorge Otero-Pailos, I'm the Director of the Historic Preservation Program at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Thank you all for joining us tonight. It is a great pleasure to welcome Richard Southwick, FAIA, who is a partner and Director of Historic Preservation at the New York base architectural firm of Bayer Blinder Bell. Richard is one of the great masters of Historic Preservation architecture, one of the great masters of adaptive reuse. He has done incredible projects in New York and around the country. Many of these you all know, including New York City Hall, the U.S. Capitol Infrastructure Master Plan. He also worked at Columbia University doing the master plan early on in his career. We can talk about that later. He worked at Greenwood Cemetery, doing their facilities master plan there as well, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, Ellis Island Museum, the National Museum of Immigration. The list goes on. He also worked in the Red Star Land Museum of Migration in Antwerp, Belgium, a really interesting museum about migration. That is such an important topic today in light of what migrations are happening around the world. Richard has distinguished himself by really working on the qualities of historic design, materials and craftsmanship and bringing them forward as the basis of his design and dedicated really his career to finding new life for older structures. Now, Richard also graduated from GSAP in 1978. It is a great pleasure to welcome Richard back home for this lecture. Thank you, Richard, for joining us. It is a pleasure to have you here. Thank you, Orhei. Good evening, everyone. I'm really glad to be speaking to the Historic Preservation Group at Columbia University. As Orhei said, I am a graduate many years ago of the school, and I'm glad to say I actually had James Marston-Fisch as one of my professors way back. I really wish I could be there in person. I've been on Zoom calls all day, and that's the last thing I wanted to do at this point, but I'm really thrilled to talk about the Sarinans TWA Flight Center. This is a project that has a lot of personal relevance to me. When I came to Columbia in 1978, the first building I came to see was the Flight Center. The second building was actually of the same hand, the Ford Foundation, and I have professionally been involved with the project since 1995, so its evolution is one that's been a great highlight of my career. The TWA Flight Center arguably is one of the most significant and recognized mid-century modernist buildings. It's a symbol of post-war optimism, a symbol of the new coming jet age, very expressive, very sculptural, on the exterior, and also on the interior. Some say that it looks like a bird in flight, but Sarinans never admitted to that, but it's an incredibly unique and creative building. What I want to talk about today is really the 60-year history, and ironically of that 60-year history, almost two decades of it have been vacant, and the lights are out, and a big part of that story is how we got the lights back on. The Flight Center opened in 1962. Shortly after its 30th anniversary, it became a New York City designated structure or landmark, which is as early as that can happen. The building was vacated in 2002. I'll talk a lot more about that. It went through two phases of restoration, one for the Port Authority of New York and the second for the designated hotel developer. Finally opened about a year and a half ago, and is in fact open for business today. I want to give you a little bit of the legacy and significance of the building first, and then we'll talk about how it's changed over time. The Flight Center was designed by Aero Sarinan in the late 1950s. Unfortunately, he died in 1961. He never saw its opening. He had a very, very short but distinguished career. He only worked in any measure of prominence for a little bit more than a decade. He won the St. Louis Arch Competition, beating as father, in fact, and that was in 1948, and ended up dying very suddenly in 1961, diagnosed with a brain tumor, and he was dead within a month. He was a great collaborator. On this project, he worked with Raymond Lowey, Charles Eames, Florence Knowles, and we'll look at some of that work a little bit later. The TWA Flight Center is located at what had been Ida Wilde Airport, now JFK International Airport. In 1938, Delano and Aldridge's LaGuardia Airport opened, and very quickly, everyone realized it was just way too small. Delano and Aldridge did a number of different schemes, a pinwheel scheme, a horseshoe scheme, Harrison McBrownowitz did a figure eight scheme. All of these turned out to be too expensive, so the New York City Airport Authority that was planning the new airport came up with another idea called Terminal City, and this is the master plan of that, and it was masterful for a couple reasons. One, we're in the post-war era where each of the airlines wanted to develop and promote their own brand identity, but more importantly, for the Authority, each airline designed and paid for their own terminal. Therefore, the Authority did not have to pay for it. They did the infrastructure and the airlines each did the terminal design and construction. TWA had arguably the most important site. The red arrow shows it being on the end of a long roadway access. SOM's large H shape, just to the left of that was the international terminal, and on the other side of international terminal was the Pan Am terminal. Those are the two prominent American airlines at the time, but TWA arguably was the most important site with a very large air side compared to their land side frontage and a very prominent location. The design went forth, went on for many years through the mid to late 1950s. We always joked that the image on the right hand side might in fact be Sarenin himself. Sarenin and his successor firm, Roach Dinklow, did a lot of work in large-scale models, which is really important for the type of a sculptural expressionist design that was being promoted from the office. The building itself got lots of press and is very highly anticipated. A few things that were really important to Sarenin were very analytical. How does one leave one's car in the parking lot, go through the entire process of getting ready to board the plane, get out, and get to the seat on the plane. Sarenin in fact went to airports all around the country with a stopwatch, and he would time that procession. His goal was to make it quicker and more efficient at TWA than any place designed in the United States. That was for both passengers and also baggage and material handling. You can see on this slide the eggshell in the center, which is a terminal. Tubes that go out to flight wings, and then from there to the plane itself. Looking more closely at the an early rendering of the flight center, it's really a flowchart right through the middle of this building to the two flight tubes on the left and right hand side. All of the support amenities and functions were on the flanks. Checking in, leaving your baggage, finding a food and beverage, a place to have a drink, or just waiting with a great view after the tarmac. The design really went through many, many iterations. In fact, at one point, the tubes were glass-enclosed, moving walkways, which were VE-ed out. It was just too expensive, but Sarenin was a great innovator, a great thinker, and applied a lot of those thoughts into this building. Equally, the structural gymnastics of this building are really impressive. Designed in the late 50s and early 60s. This was the time of great fascination with thin-shell structures. It was the time of Pierre-Louis G. Narravy's George Washington Bridge bus terminal, which opened in 1963. Architects and engineers are taking great advantage of the material of reinforced concrete. The shell here ranges from 5 inches to 18 inches in section. It's really quite thin. What's incredible, the roof is over an acre and a half at 65,000 square feet. The entire roof is supported on four columns. Each column might be the size of a Manhattan studio apartment, but four columns nonetheless. I always give the example of a bird with two very, very thin legs, with half of the weight in the front, half of the weight behind, and it's in perfect balance. This is a close-up of the roof structure. There are four large concrete lobes, and they are in almost perfect balance. You can see at the lower right one of the very large columns, each column or yoke supports two adjacent concrete lobes. They come together in slight compression on the back three, the two sides on the back, and slight tension on the front. We had the great opportunity to work with the avatour, and we had a number of oral histories. I think Glenn Bernasian's listening in, and Glenn was a big part of some of those interviews. And this is all done pre-computer slide rules. Some of the drawings we found had all the calculations on that, but a perfect balance of these four very, very large pieces of concrete. There was an ongoing debate between Amon and Whitney, who's the structural engineer and Saranen, of whether this could be one large piece of, expansive piece of concrete or whether it needed control joints. And you'll see the blue lines here, which are skylights, which are effectively expansion joints. The overall shells, larger than the football field is 315 feet edge to edge, and the great compromise was to add skylights, which introduced a lot of neutralizing light within the interior, and provided the expansion joint that the structure engineers insisted was necessary. This is probably my most favorite photograph of construction, taking place in about 1960. It was a non-stop, 120-hour concrete pour. What I find really fascinating, because the building was built or designed on the cusp of the jet age. On the left-hand side, you see one of the great prop planes of the era, the Lockheed Constellation, sat about 110 passengers. And the right-hand side, a very early Boeing 707, which also sat about 100, 110 passengers. And the building itself was designed for passenger loads of about that size. And that becomes a bit of a problem later on. So, anyway, the building finally opened in 1962 to great acclaim. Adelaide Huxtable, the New York Times, architectural critic at the time, stated in one of the reviews, of all the buildings proposed for Idlewild Airport, the TWA Flight Center was by far the most dubious idea, but was by far the most successful. And Sarenin made the cover time magazine. It's got great press. And it was a photograph, Ezra Stoller, do one of his great monographs, just when it opened. These are a couple of photographs. This is the celebrated beak, which was actually a drainage for the rainwater coming off the shells with a small fountain at the edge of the beak. One of the interiors, and I would like to say that there's not a square corner anywhere in this building. Some of the innovations, if you look on the right, this was the first building to have baggage carousels. One of the ideas that Sarenin helped to develop. On the left, one of the tubes out to the waiting rooms. On the right, the waiting room. And in the back, the jetways we know today to get from the waiting room to the plane. This was the first building which had jetways as well. So very innovative, very analytical, and very successful for a few years. But not a lot, not a long time. This is a photograph from about 1970. Is very crowded and you see a lot of not so happy passengers. The aviation industry just took off in the 1960s. When the terminal was designed in 1955, there were 3.5 million passengers going through New York City. By the time that the building opened in 1962, that 3.5 million was increased to 11.5 million passengers. So the building just could not accommodate the amount of traffic that went through it. These are actually more current photographs. But one of the real problems was that the building was really designed for that 100 person or 100 seat plane, be it the Lockheed Consolation, the Boeing 707. And what was in the strong development in the late 1950s was the supersonic transport, the Concorde, which also sat about 100 passengers. In 1970, TWA brought on their first wide body jets, the Boeing 747. And that effectively rendered the TWA Flight Center obsolete. So in a way, you could say it was obsolete within 10 years of opening. If you look at the morphology diagrams along the bottom of this slide, the building tried to adapt. There were additions, baggage, structures, larger waiting rooms and the like. But it could never really adapt to the types of passenger loads that were being experienced. When we did our research, we identified a period of significance, 1962 to 1967. Those are the first two diagrams on the left. And that 1967 was the time at which Serena's original design intent was finally executed. And you can see all the additions beyond that all the way over to one on the right hand side, which shows when the jet blue terminal was added to the air side of TWA. TWA went through a lot of changes over the years. In 1978, in the Carter administration, the airline deregulation act was passed. This created a lot of low-cost competition for the major airlines. People Express was, and if you remember that was one of the later airlines and others, some of the airlines that started to have low-cost fairs that made it much harder for the TWA's and Pan Amsters to survive. TWA went in and out of bankruptcy a number of times in 1992, 95, and finally in 2001, where American Airlines bought their assets and took the terminal over. After 9-11, air traffic really dropped and the building was in January 2002 was finally deserted and vacated. So this really set the stage for the next chapter in the life of the TWA Flight Center, really the revitalization or the post-terminal use. So Byer Blunderbell was brought on board to work with the Port Authority of New York, New Jersey that ran Kennedy Airport in 1995 as a preservation consultant. And we looked at a number of different assignments, but it got particularly critical once the building was vacated. We looked at a stabilization plan to keep the building secure, developed a preservation plan, and more importantly looked at concept designs for what the building could be used if it were no longer an airline terminal. We looked at a conference center, a museum, general aviation, or in other words a private airline terminal, and and finally looked at it as an on-airport hotel. And that was what was decided about 2005. The Port Authority knew that the cost to restore the terminal was beyond the pro-form of any hotel developer that may come in to turn this into a hotel. So we looked at a phase one restoration, which included a number of life safety improvements. We wanted to make sure that the building was watertight and secure wouldn't degrade. I did a lot of the interior restoration, which is very expensive, and then all that prepped it for the phase two development. And basically it deferred the cost of the restoration. Those were borne by the Port Authority, so the developer later on would not need that. The phase two, which took place about 10 years later when a designated developer came on board, and this was MCR development out of New York City, was to turn this building into a hotel. There were a couple preservation objectives that were very important. We felt that it's really important to tie the building and the flight tubes to the new JetBlue terminal, and that's what you see in the aerial photograph. So whatever used to place in the old flight center, it got backfed by the number of passengers going through JetBlue. JetBlue is the busiest airline at Kennedy Airport. And the Port Authority made a commitment that this would always be the historic anchor of any new development at JFK. I want to point out one other thing. If you look at the JetBlue, which is a Y-shaped building to the right of the image, the two large flight wings needed to be demolished to allow JetBlue to be built. And this was determined to be an adverse effect. Because the TWA terminal was deemed eligible to be on the national register, this triggered a section 106 review. As we went through that, there were a number of mitigations to take care of the demolition. One was to do a full part one and part two national register application. The next was to do the HABS documentation for the building. We did a partial, mostly interior and some of the exterior restoration again to defer those costs so the developer would not need to bear those. There was a interpretive exhibit that has been developed to tell the story of JFK Airport, Saranin, and also the TWA Flight Center, and particularly to memorialize the parts of the buildings that were lost. And then there's a redevelopment advisory committee that was set up to review and advise upon the ongoing restoration. And that included the New York State Historic Preservation Office, the FAA, the Advisory Council of Historic Preservation, and even the Finnish Councilate, Saranin being a favorite son of Finland. So lots of parties, up to 22 consulting parties got involved with the project. Any restoration project, any good architectural project starts with good solid research. Fortunately, this building was very well documented. Yale University had an archive of all the existing drawings and correspondence. We actually found some of the early drawings before they were shifted to Yale, which were at Avery Library at Columbia. We were fortunate to be able to have oral histories and interviews with Kevin Roach, with Abbott Tor from the Amon and Whitney, with Caesar Pelley, and they were all very insightful in terms of the development. The building was very well photographed by Esther Stoller and a number of good architectural photographers at the time. Through the research we identified the period of significance, which I had shown on those morphology drawings. So we ended up starting to do a number of repairs to the building to try to keep it a little bit more sound and sustainable. The concrete on the two wings was in really poor shape. It had been coated about 10 years earlier with a very impermeable coating, and it started to trap water and moisture. It was doing a lot of damage and destroying the concrete and really rusting out a lot of the rebar. So a lot of this was all repaired and reconstructed. Literally you had mineral deposits leaching out of this concrete and creating stalagmites on the sidewalk underneath. ICR did a lot of the conservation work with us. You see a series of samples of how to remove that coating and removed it on the two wings, not on the main shell, because the main shell did not suffer the same damage, being a much higher quality concrete. And here's a couple of photographs from the shell. We did non-destructive testing and found that there's very, very little damage. There was some local damage where we went in and had to repair some of the concrete. You see some tests of removing the coating. On the lower left is interesting that these are the leaching of the mineral deposits through the concrete. The next thing we tackled was the curtain wall. This was originally from a 1962 building. It was polished plate glass, half-inch thick, and it was set within what's known as a zipper gasket. It's a neoprene gasket, which has a insert that applies pressure to the glass to keep it in place. Neoprene, after about 50 years, really started to harden. It started to fail. A lot of the glass dropped and shattered. You can see on the left, there were a number of plywood replacements where the glass had been lost. And at one point, a purple solar film was put on much of the building. You can see the condition of the neoprene on the right-hand side. There were 400 and some pieces of glass, all of different sizes and shapes. Right-hand side shows the very complex geometries of some of these. It was all replaced with LOF green tinted glass, basically to match the original spec, but in tempered glass. And we decided not to put a film back on, but leave the green tinted glass in its original condition. There were also a number of creations that were added over the years. A lot of these were for new security or check-in. There were a number of these vestibules. You see on the left that were all removed. Probably the most incriminating addition was this very extensive, very poorly placed bus shelter, which was placed right in front of the building. It totally blocked the historic scene. So these are all taken out as part of the demolition of that phase one. This is a view of one of the restored main entrances. We ended up going back to existing shop drawings and solar photographs. Went back to Abloy, the original hardware manufacturer, and they were able to replicate the leather door pulls of this. When JetBlue was built, it required a modification to the two-flight tubes. The roadway to get to, the rival roadway to get to JetBlue required that the tubes be raised slightly. And the tubes, which were very important, landed at the new JetBlue terminal. Again, to backfeed the passengers from JetBlue into whatever use would take place in this new building. So it was basically a steel hula hoop with stucco outside. And these are two photographs of that construction. And two final photographs after it was restored, the throat of the tube on the south side, and then a tube that where we removed the industrial grade carpet, we added new light safety to meet contemporary building code requirements and the typical cherry pepper red carpet that you see throughout the building. When we got involved with design within the terminal itself, the team sat down and we do this on a lot of projects. We come up with either what we call design guidelines. Here we call these rules for the restoration. And we wanted to look at a slightly different attitude for existing construction that was being totally restored to new interventions within the terminal that would be adjacent to the existing construction. The restoration was easy. It was very well documented. We followed the original design intent, photographs with great sources as well as shop drawings and contract documents. And we even were able to get a number of archival samples. The new interventions, that's the more interesting part of this endeavor. We wanted to put ourselves in the mind of Serenin but distinguish the new construction from the old. And we used a very similar palette of materials and even design concepts in terms of the cove bases and the like. But it was all a little bit more spare or refined than Serenin and mine had done. We use this as a litmus test through the design. We'll go back to this in the middle design to make sure we're not really veering away from the rules we had established in the beginning of the project. One of the most important interior spaces was the sunken lounge. This is the main waiting area right in front of the large curtain wall looking at the tarmac. We used a lot of original photographs and renderings. In the 1990s, TWA was doing very well for a period. And they actually totally covered this over from more ticket counters. When they took those counters out, they partially reinstalled it again with industrial gray carpeting. And many of the seating and other elements were all removed. The upper right is a very early photograph. And in 2005, this is a photograph of what we found when we got involved with the phase 1 restoration. Again, using shop drums and CDs and photographs, we found a diner fabricator that would do these banquette seats in Long Island City. We reconstructed the concrete substrate, did all the seating, and then restored this very accurately. The only change is that the built-in asterisks that were prevalent throughout this were left out. But that is very, very accurate as a restoration. And this is a more recent photograph at the time of the opening in 2019. You can see a restored Lockheed Consolation, which I'll talk about a little bit later, through the windows of the curtain wall. Earlier, I'd say that there's not one square corner. The way to build a very curvilinear, sculpted form like this is a very small unit tile. And Serendin used what was a fairly common material in the 1960s, was a Italian mosaic ceramic tile. They're half-inch diameter typically, but over the many years they really degraded. These are some of the conditions we found when we moved in. Lots of really poor repairs or no repairs in many cases. So we ended up doing a complete survey of the upper and lower lobbies, the main lobby space in the building. We gridded the building in 10-foot grids, photographed it, and identified a whole series of repairs. You can see the size of the tile on the left-hand side. There's a penny. They're called penny tiles, but they're half-inch in diameter. But there are also thousands of, besides a half-inch, thousands of three-eighth and quarter-inch tiles, which were used for bending the grids to be able to do a lot of these curvilinear shapes. We ordered about three and a half million pieces of this for the phase one. Bear in mind they're about 6,000 pieces per square foot and about another 10 million for phase two. These are just some photographs of probably the most challenging portion of this. This is a mock-up that ICR worked on for the nosing of the stairs, particularly with rolly bags that people use now. These were subjected to a lot of damage and abuse. So we looked at stainless steel anchors, an epoxy-based mortar, and then special hand-pressed nosing tiles right along the edge. There are repairs and restoration of all types. We were able to locate a itinerant tile restoration group coming off of Project Miami. They came and worked on this project for almost a year. Each of the five people in the crew were certified for different types of repairs. The simplest was just a single tile replacement to do these really elaborate three dimensional curves. In a way you can see these people working. It's almost like doing dental surgery. Very fine work. Part of the key was to restore it, but never make it look brand new. This is a view of the stairs. It still shows its age. It's patina, but if you compare that to the couple slides ago where this was totally deteriorated, we wanted to make sure that the patina, which is a sign of its legacy shown through. Other than the lobby, the most important public space, interior space in the building, is the Ambassadors Club. This is the TWA first-class lounge. It's on one of the miscellaneous on the north side. You see a photograph when it first opened in 1962. When we started doing work on this part of the building in 2014, you can see the condition. Again, sound research discovered that this had actually gone through a number of changes in the first five years after it opened. Serenade did an original design. A big collaborator with him was Charles Themes on this. At the request of TWA, much of it was changed a few years later and Roche Stinkaloo, the successor firm, ended up doing what you see in blue. They made a number of changes to the lounge. We decided to go back to the original design, which is 1962 Serenade design. We used the original construction documents to inform us. The right-hand rendering or diagram is really the morphology of the two generations overlapped. Yale University had the Serenade archives. Within the files, we were lucky to find original sample boards. That's what you see in the upper middle. These are tucked away for probably half a century and never seen a lighted day. The colors and the fabrics were really very true. The image on the left again was original. If you look through that small doorway, you see one of the Florence Knoll patterns or wall fabrics. We were able to work with Knoll and get that recreated. Lighting is not as good on the one on the right, but we recreated that lounge through that doorway with very similar types of fabrics. I really want to talk about what's outside of the terminal. The terminal became the lobby for a new hotel, but the hotel itself required a lot of new construction on this very small site. Interestingly, an airline terminal and a hotel lobby have very similar programs. There's check-in, there's restaurants and bars, there's waiting, and there's back of house. About the only function that's not the same was the baggage channeling. The TWA hotel was the only on-airport hotel, which really guarantees its success. There are four buildings total, 505 rooms, a couple very large ballroom backwood halls in a number of meeting rooms, and then seven bars and restaurants throughout. The program really considers this to be a full service hotel that happens to be on an airport. Much of the meeting ballroom backwood functions occur with a very very large population within five or 10 miles. The fact that it's an airport hotel is just one aspect of its overall program. This is a rendering, an aerial rendering of the site. TWA Flight Center, the original building, is really dedicated to the lobby functions. There are two seven-story hotel buildings tucked behind outside of the two tubes. This is important so that when you stand at the front of the building, the fountain plaza, if you will, they are basically outside of the historic scene, and we've left the area in the center between the two tubes open. You see the conny, that's the restored Khlaki constellation, but more importantly, underneath that is a 46,000 underground event space. To get from the terminal to the other buildings was a bit of a challenge. We did not want to have a tube from the terminal directly to the hotels. We really did not want to go underground, so we went back to Serenin's original circulation. The tubes are always the way to get people to the planes. We decided to intercept that at midpoint, and we added these 10-foot really light class bridges from the tubes to the hotels. Once you enter the hotel, the red rectangles are the elevator and stair cores. The bridges are cantilevered from the concrete structure of the hotels, and they touch the two very lightly. I say they kiss the tube, and we just basically just opened a opening within the tube to be able to transfer from the tube to the hotels. On the left, once you get to the core on that left or north hotel, you then extend down a very large grand stair to the conference center as well. So how do we find the room for the two hotels on a very constricted site? These few diagrams show the site condition when the work started in 2014. If you remember the morphology diagram, there were additions that were added throughout the building, including on the two wings, and that extended the building much closer to G.F. Louvre. The first move was to go back to the original footprint, restore the 1962 terminal, and that removed what we call the bat wings of these two large extensions, and that created a real estate for the two blue boxes that you see on the 2019 portion of this slide. These follow the curve of the roadway, the curve of the terminal, and they meet all the New York City setback requirements as well. Left hand slide is the scar tissue, where the bat wing or the addition was taken off. In the right hand slide, which is really fascinating, was taking a whole large part of the program and putting it underground to not block the view out of the flight terminal. This is an excavation that went down 30 feet below grade. The hotel design needed to do two things, not only provide rooms, but also provide this very neutral backdrop to the sculptural, the sculptural serenity in the foreground. When JetBlue is built and the air train walkways are all built, there's an incredible amount of visual clutter behind the terminals. One of the functions of the seven-story hotel wings was to block all that out and provide a neutral gray background, so the hotel-related flight center really just shown in the foreground. The curtain wall through the hotel followed the same curve. It segmented. The biggest challenge here was that particularly in the south building, it was very, very close to one of the taxiways for the major international A380s, new white lines coming in. Working with ceramic acoustics in their acoustic labs, we developed a very unique curtain wall, almost five inches thick, seven panes or lights glass, triple glazed, and it was fine-tuned to be able to block out both those really low rumbling, low frequency sounds of a dead engine taking off and the really high squeaky sounds of a truck brake as the truck's backing up. So we looked at many, many different variations. Again, a computer generated and came up with the design that she's on the right. These are two images, one of the curtain wall following the curve of the TWA flight center and one of the suites in the hotel with a great view overlooking the flight center itself. Here's the lobby plan, where, similar to Saranin's low chart, this really works the same way. You come right up through the center of the building. Check-in on the left-hand side, which was the international check-in now for hotels. A food hall on the right side, which was the domestic check-in. The sunken lounge is still a waiting area, and then you go out to the two tubes and work your way to the hotels. Before and after, a Saranin view on the upper left of the check-in counters in much worse shape in 2014. Lower left and then restored for the hotel check-in on the right-hand side. The old baggage retrieval hall, the baggage hall was probably one of the more interesting parts of the design. It was the, other than the main lobby itself, was the only long span space in the two wings. It was a long span to be able to get all the baggage aerosols in with that column in the center of the space. Again, the baggage handling was about the only function that was not required for the hotel. This was adaptably reused into a new ball, and the long span of the structure was very important for that. And if you notice the lights, very, very risk, very similar to the lights of the Brewer's Whitney Museum. And that was one of the interpretive designs that you'll see in a number of places throughout the building. Here's a view from the front door of the casking steps all the way out to the tarmac, where you see NYC. That's a restored split flap information board by S. Polari out of Italy. These are original from the building. And we fortunately took a side trip to Udine, Italy, outside of Venice, and were able to get these attuities restored. And they're now important parts of the amenity or experience of the guests. Two other views of the interior. Now, let's go downstairs for just a minute. The event center, the conference center, was a very important part of their program. And this is what draws in not only people from the airport, but people from New York and people from the region. The event space is 30 feet low grade. There's one large 7,000 square foot ballroom in about 40 different meeting rooms of various sizes. This is particularly challenging because it's 30 feet low grade. And Kennedy airport was basically built in a marsh. The water table is eight feet low grade. So similar to World Trade Center, this is built as a bathtub. And because it's a very large open volume, it tends to float. So it's built on piles. The piles are actually tie down piles and they're adjusted to keep the building down rather than to support it up. So it doesn't float from the buoyancy of the water pressure. This is the pre-function space. Long linear space lighting is very important in the design. You see again similarly these very large circular lights, aluminum ceilings. We wanted to provide as much ambient lighting throughout to dissuade the visitor from the idea that he's 30 feet low or three stories below grade. You can actually see some interpretive exhibits required by the section 106 mitigation in number of these beaches as well. This is that large ballroom. It can be subdivided into three spaces and hold up to a thousand people overall. The clear story light again gives the sense that you're above grade rather than three stories below grade. There are cocktail lounges throughout the project as there are many airline terminals, but probably the most interesting one was this 1958 Lockheed Constellation. This is very significant to the project. Howard Hughes owned TWA for many years and he conceived this plane. It was the first plane that could fly across country without stopping and the importance there not only was it was a little bit of a shorter flight, but it allowed the airline to do one crew rather than two, so it was much less, much more cost-efficient. Tyler Morse, the developer, was able to purchase one of these from Lutanza Airlines, was restoring another one and cannibalized a lot of the parts out of this plane for one they wanted to make airworthy. We were able to basically bring this thing up to code, restore it, and bring it down to New York and this is it being hoisted into position and turned it into just this incredibly interesting cocktail lounge. We used a lot of the old advertising photographs and images as an inspiration for the new insurers. One of the last slides of the new construction is of the rooftop of one of the two hotel buildings. The other roof is a fully self-contained code generation plant. This building is off-grid and it produces all of its power through natural gas on its own power plant, but this is a South hotel with a view overlooking the Bay runway and you're very, very close to the planes coming into the International Terminal and it's a curved spa. It's a pool heated to 95 degrees all year long and a small lounge on top of the South building and open 365 days a year. So I wanted to talk a bit about what's next for TWA. The building opened in May of 2019. It's been a tough year because of COVID, but they are operating their occupancy counts are increasing. But if we go back historically, we talked about Terminal City. TWA was the last of the Terminal City buildings to be completed. You can see it in red. You see SOM's big international terminal next to that and then TAM's Pan Am on the opposite of the International Terminal. Actually next to TWA was IMPACE National Terminal. Those three national TWA and Pan Am were all deemed eligible to be listed on the national register. TWA was the only one that survived and in the master plan that ported 40 per fourth in the mid-1990s called JFK 2000, they planned to keep TWA and you see the jet balloon array behind it. But all of the fewer terminals now and each of those got larger. And this plan is basically executed to some form similar to this. And then Governor Cuomo a couple of years ago came out with the new JFK plan, JFK 2025. And again, the terminals get larger and a smaller number. There are two large clam shells which are these two big mega terminals. But again on the end of the access, if you look at the lower right hand of the Symmetge, the TWA terminal still becomes this historic keystone or anchor for the airport. And this is now development and in a way that the fact that jet blue was built behind TWA made the TWA site obsolete for anything airline related. So the hotel became a very useful function for that space. And it now again becomes the main focus of the airport. So I want to thank you for the last 45 minutes or so. As Saranen was a great collaborator with a number of other designers, so was PBB on this. I just want to give recognition to some of the other designers that work with us. Librarano Ciavera, Architects was the hotel architect and worked on some of the concepts of the site plan. Inc. Architects did all the interior design for the event spaces, Stonehill, Telig, the interior design for the hotels. And Matthews Nielsen was the landscaping architect. And for me it's been a 25-year role on this project. I'm thrilled it's finally open for business. As you all know, a vacant historic building is a dead building. And we're thrilled that this finally came into fruition. So thank you for your time. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Richard. Well, I'm the official clapper. So thank you so much. This was really a terrific talk. For those of you that would like to ask some questions, please do put them in the chat. And I will read them off to Richard as we go. As you think about your questions, we'll spend maybe the next 15-20 minutes in Q&A. Richard, I wanted to start off by asking you about how do you hold a team this large, focused together? You mentioned all of the people that were involved in this. And you talked about the way that you work with these design guidelines, the principles that you abide by when you create rules for how do you restore, how do you intervene? Can you tell us a little bit more about those guidelines and how do they actually work during the design process? Do you find yourself going back to them often or having to bring the team to discuss the guidelines? Because, of course, guidelines can be interpreted. So that's your purpose. But how does that happen? This seems like the outcome in this project was particularly successful. Was there something about the process that was different than other projects? Or have you now perfected this process of how do you work with the team? Tell us a little bit about that. I think the team structure was fairly unique for us. We rarely work with as many design partners and also a developer that had a very strong vision for the site. But the idea of having design guidelines or principles, and we established those very early on, is a commonality to all of our design projects. We sit down with some of the key people in the firm and we hash out, we talk through the project in the beginning. I use it as a litmus test. We go back and end at every phase or even more frequently. And are we being true to the guidelines that we established? Guidelines are not cast in stone. They are open to interpretation. They might be able to be changed throughout. They tend to be fundamentally sound. It's understanding the character defining features of the building. It's understanding what the original design intent might have been. And then using good preservation principles as we debate how you intervene in the original building. I strongly believe and I think we've talked about this in the past, but many of our clients come to us and they believe a building can't be changed. It's a landmark. It's cast in stone. And I always say no, that's not true. The best buildings throughout history have long lives. And a change needs to be appropriate. It needs not to overwhelm the original concept of the building. But if you look at the image on the screen right now, you still see this is an image from opening night. This is certainly not what Sarenin envisioned. But conceptually, if you look at the main views out through the main curtain wall, we tried to recreate a view that went out to the sky in an airline, to the airfield. I didn't show you a detail, but we very carefully designed a warped plane which blocked out all of the automobile traffic on the other side of that tarmac. So you saw the upper part of JetBlue and you saw the sky, but you wouldn't see any of the roadways. We're really conscious of what's important in a project. We keep going back to testing that. In light of that, I wanted to ask you about the section 106 review and the adverse effect mitigation techniques that you mentioned, one of them being this notion of the interpretive exhibits, which I find wonderful as one walks throughout the terminal. There's all these moments in which you're creating these scenes almost in which you discover about the history of TWA or the history of Sarenin's involvement with the building. Tell us how that came about, how your decision to mitigate for one adverse effect came to the solution of interpretive exhibits. It's not a direct causality. I mean, how did that discussion go and how did you come up with it? It actually started with another airport project I worked on around the year 2000, a really important but much less known building a New York airport from 1935. We actually suggested that to the New Jersey ship boat that for what was being lost, how do we memorialize that? How do we tell the story? When we got to literally it was a three to four year ultimate negotiation with Shippo and FAA and everyone else, one of the things we offered very quickly is you're losing part of the original building. You'll never be able to understand this building as Sarenin originally envisioned it because it's a brand new world now. How can you tell that story of the Kennedy Airport Evolution, TWA, and the importance of Sarenin? It's a little bit different here because it's scattered throughout the building. I find that actually fascinating. There's a story about Sarenin which is a basically replicated Bloomfield Hill's architect's office at the end of one of the tubes and there's another thing on Howard Hughes, there's another thing on just the whole evolution of the TWA airline. In all of these there are dozens of stories. We actually worked with the New York Historical Society early on to help develop the stories. Again, another one of the many designers that work with us. There is a paradox in this project isn't there in terms of airport design because so many airports are designed to be flexible and expandable and then they somehow cannot fulfill that expandability and end up getting torn down. You showed us the various plans for the future of JFK and yet this building is notorious for not being expandable and it seems to be the only one that has survived or will survive all of these expansions. A really good question. Sarenin, when he was designing this and again a great analytical problem solver also designed Dulles airport outside of Washington and if you know Dulles which is the extruded flight wing. Dulles was expanded about 15 years ago. It was always doubled in size by expanding that extrusion which gave it much more capacity and that one did not use the tubes or the jet the jetways. There they still use a series of mobile lounges where you actually take a bus out to the plane but that one actually survived and was able to be expanded. This building because it's unique geometry and form just that can never happen. Perkins and Will in the 1990s to the big underground expansion basically where the conference center is. It was never executed but they also saw how difficult it was to expand this. So what I was saying a little bit earlier when JetBlue was built this piece of property became actually useless as an airline terminal and the fact that it's useless as an airline terminal basically guaranteed its long-term survival. When we got involved with the project first in 1995 the building was just listed on the New York City landmarks listed as the New York City landmark. Port Authority called me in from our preservation experience and said you know can we tear it down. Port Authority has what they consider a superior jurisdiction so it could have been demolished. But we all came collectively to the understanding that no one wanted to hold the sledgehammer to tear this building down was too important. So you know very quickly they realized that this building had a legacy and it really was the story of JFK. A really tragic story which was important for this building Neil Levin I don't know if you remember that name Neil Levin was the the chairperson of the Port Authority who died in 9-11 and three days before that we toured Kennedy Airport and TWA with Neil Levin and he was going to identify this as the keystone of that JFK 2000 plan and the New York Times was going to have a big article which would have been the Sunday after the Tuesday of 9-11 of course none of that came to pass but the torch was passed. I mean there are other developer development people at the Port Authority who I've always considered born again preservationists they quickly understood how important this building was even to the point of doing some things in the restoration that were VE'd out the value engineered out during the realism construction we did the gas getting the right way we did a couple of the other the curtain wall the right way when it was never done fully correctly first time around. There's a question here from Katie Anjan in the audience that dovetails into what you were just talking about she's asking what were the biggest construction obstacles when it came to the restoration and intervention? There are really two one the insistence that this building built in the 1938 code building code meet the 2014 building code in terms of exiting and life safety and sprinklers and fire protection all that and we had about a three-year negotiation with the Port Authority to prove that this building was safer than ever after we're done and then the other was to building the build the event space 30 feet below grade and keep it down there I talk about these tie-down columns it's all built to current seismic codes so every joint 30 feet down had to be loose enough for a seismic event but solid enough to keep that water pressure up you know those are things you don't even think about probably the the restoration challenge was how far do you restore something so it looks restored but not new and I want to just give a little sidebar example years ago we did the restoration of the main building in Ellis Island and a successful project I would say there was a fault to that it was over restored you talked about the red star and that was the museum the National Museum of Immigration 20 years later we did the Museum of Migration or Immigration or Antwerp the Red Star Line Museum and there we purposely did not restore to the same extent we wanted it to show its age and you know that's one of the more mature lessons you learn through experience you know how far to make something and you know a lot of it's really subtle nuanced and you know we had a great team between our conservator and some of the people on staff at BBB we had a great team that really got that they really understood it let me let me ask you a little bit to expand on that because there was some important architects that worked on this building afterwards like Roshan Dinkalo which were the inheritors of the of the Sarin infirm but you decided to remove those pieces out uh yeah there are a couple areas one when we just when we established the period of significance we felt it was very justifiable to remove any accretion built after that date which was 1967 and that essentially allowed the it provided the land for the hotels to be built when we looked at the ambassador club we felt that the original design intent of Sarin and Charles Innes who did a lot of the built-in furniture uh was more important than probably the coerced change of Roshan Dinkalo uh that the TWA grass I think uh forced upon that um Warren Platner uh worked on this project Cesar Pele these are a lot of the big names from the 66 70s uh and they all passed through uh Eric Sarin's office um Roshan Dinkalo of course being this successor firm can you tell us a little bit about the the concrete there all these figures were there and I remember speaking to Cesar Pele about the his work at the U.S. Embassy in Oslo they were working on all these projects almost parallel processing the concrete is such an important part of that project also of the project in in London and Sarin had almost experimenting different kinds of concrete mixes and ideas in each of these projects uh simultaneously the one in London was supposed to get get dark over time with pollution and he talked about that and the one in Norway was a very experimental use of black concrete uh to to imitate Labradorite and in this one um was it was it covered over to begin with was or was I mean you mentioned this um it looked like an elastomeric coating that was put in at some point was that was that was it exposed concrete to begin with the the coating was never part of the original um uh intent uh but even before the building opened um it started a leak um so we we found some really interesting research about how to seal this building um the the building was concrete colored for many many years and a couple distinctive things and it's bore formed so if you look really closely you see the you know three or four inch wide boards or planks that were bent to make these forms and to really um convey the sense of concrete it was um uh it really the natural color uh was retained um only in the late 90s to the port TWA before Port Authority took over TWA added this very damaging elastomeric coating Port Authority does aerial photographs of older airports every year and very high resolution you could see late 80s early 90s this beautiful concrete color um 96 on it was painted white and we had a big debate and uh interestingly the uh New York State Historic Preservation Office really supported keeping the white color because it had been perceived as such for the last 25 years um it's one of the things we just read on but um uh a detail not a minor detail but uh the client also wanted the white color because that's all he knew as well there's something very tactile about that concrete and in general the whole project seems so experiential and this is um I imagine coming to some degree from Sarenin but you also push the envelope in some ways right there is there is music from the 1960s there is um a kind of theming of the of the space um how do you what's your what's your perspective on that uh aspect of it um I I tend not to want to be too kitschy however um you walk through I've never seen guests in a hotel as happy as they are I'm the soundtrack the the the operator actually has actors and actresses in costume 1960s pilots and flight attendants the Beatles soundtrack in the background you see people basically dancing through the space um it it really is a very joyful experiential space for that but it's also one of transition you know you work your way through a this contemporary entryway we didn't really show it in the I didn't talk about in the presentation but there's a large curved walkway that goes from the air train to a Dan Kiley-esque set of fountains modernist fountains outside of the main entry and you know that's all very contemporary the uh covered walkway is to use an architect piece it's a dialogue with the wings it's the same type of form but with a fabric covering and you're still in a very contemporary environment until you walk into the building and then you you know it's kind of a time warp and then you go to the tubes you go through those little 10 foot glass bridges and then you're back into a more contemporary version of what might have been a more modernist palette yes well very there's all very deliberate what's the nuance between the new and the old and I mean you guys in the preservation classes talk about that all the time but uh it's not trivial it really comes through so elegantly in in this project and also the contrast with what air travel has become where when you go into this terminal you really you know the the your level of tension kind of drops tremendously I wanted to ask you one last question regarding what what you felt uh you know having really developed a career as a preservation architect um and and you know we have many students in the room that aspire to be preservation architects you know what would you say are the characteristics that that define a good preservation architect or an excellent preservation architect versus a a traditional new construction architect uh probably threefold you need to be informed about precedent in history you know you're not always reinventing the wheel because lots of people made really good wheels before you uh you need to be creative you can't have handcuffs on where things have to be exactly as they were and third you need to be flexible because particularly to do an adaptive reuse you need to change buildings to make sure they can have a new life that's great great advice thank you Richard thank you for sharing your project your knowledge your experience with us it's been a pleasure to have you with us in this virtual mode at at Columbia University to welcome you back uh to to your alma mater um thank you so much thanks again well thanks for having me it's my pleasure and thanks to everyone for joining us for for this talk good night everyone