Former Kansas City Print Newsman Admits: New Airport Is Just A Big Parking Lot

This meandering missive from a former journalist is mostly useless except for one important line.

EVEN SUPPORTERS OF NEW KCI CONCEDE THAT PARKING FAIL DOMINATES THE STRUCTURE!!!

Here's an important passage . . .

One could begin with the original sin that the airport plan omitted anything resembling a convenient mass-transit connection to the heart of the city. We remain beholden to the automobile. No matter the swank cladding of the 6,000-space parking garage, designed by architects at BNIM, it’s still a hulking box of cars. In some views the garage seems to be the main attraction, with the glass, wood and limestone terminal structure demurely waiting to be noticed as a sleek and fanciful appendage.

One might also lament that airport officials, in the spirit of preservation and reuse, couldn’t — or wouldn’t — devise a way to save and repurpose at least one of the original KCI horseshoe-shaped terminals. Of course, their priority was to save only one old terminal’s parking garage.

Nevertheless, the new terminal, primarily a design-by-committee project led by the formidable firm of SOM, does the job it was supposed to do in its H-shaped array of rectangular boxes.

Read more via www.TonysKansasCity.com link . . .

Our New Airport Blends Anxieties and Uplift - KC STUDIO

Nick Cave's huge ceiling installation "The Air Up There" comprises dangling cut-metal shapes. (photo by Jim Barcus) Well, how do you like it now, ladies and gentlemen? It struck me as inevitable that the new KCI airport would hit some operational speedbumps.