![]() They describe their role as involved in “every aspect of airport design and development.” The delightful coincidence of their acronym “ NACO”-a distinctively pejorative term for “unculturedness” in Mexican Spanish-doesn’t fully explain their almost occult presence in the project. In the winning team, this firm is Netherlands Airport Consultants (NACO), a Dutch firm with a long history of designing and supervising airports in Saudi Arabia. ![]() ![]() The need to include both a “local” representative and a big name from the world of architecture stardom has the further effect of directing attention away from the third but equally vital component of the team-the airport consultancy. Foster’s Mexican complement is the young architect Fernando Romero-communication magnate Carlos Slim’s son-in-law. The competition (which Alejandro Hernández has rightly criticized for its lack of transparency) paired famed international architects with local designers-the rationale, one has to assume, being that the Mexicans alone didn’t have sufficient experience in airport design. ![]() This nationalist anxiety hides the real politics of the expanded airport program.Ī few weeks ago, the Mexican state unveiled the plans for a new airport to serve Mexico City, in the form of a digital video that was equal parts promotional rendering and documentary homage to the leader of the design team, Lord Norman Foster. As the architecture that often constitutes a country’s first point of entry, airports are borders, and as such have become loaded with cultural and patriotic tropes. 1 However, the increase in border security has turned Augé’s description upside down. ![]() Anthropologist Marc Augé famously described airports as “non-places,” generic spaces of transience that resist the rootedness of memory. These programs, inflated by extensive security protocols and ambitious retail spaces, are usually arranged under sculptural canopies, like extra weight tucked under additional layers of clothing. As air travel increasingly compresses our muscles and nerves-cue threats of thrombosis and incidents of passenger rage-airports expand their programs, taking up increasingly larger swaths of land. ![]()
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