Being in an airport is as close to weightlessness as you can get in a secular world. As you check in and pass through the barriers and systems that verify your identity, your earthly self seems to fall away. It’s as though your passports biometric chip compress your identity into something you slip into your inside pocket while you drift through elaborate displays of alcohol and blinding arrays of backlit sunglasses. It’s so boring that it becomes sublime: a yawn is the only possible response to the overwhelming wonder of the modern world.
Airport space is forged out of beaurocratic, state and commercial interests in almost-pure form. Invisible currents of logistics, border controls, security procedures and retail offers sweep us through spaces whose scale is so inflated that normal spatial logic collapses. Ramps, lifts, corridors and stairs lead you from hall through checkpoints to balconies lined with shops. Up, down, turn around, back under: architecture disappears into a haze of volume where its hard to find the edge and impossible to judge the shape of the building you are in, whether you are above ground or below ground, going further in or further out. Low and horizontal, like a flat landscape fading into mist.
But amongst this military-industrial, secular-infrastructural environment one room strikes a strange note. You’ll find it signposted by a pictogram of a kneeling man, black on yellow. It’s a sign that suggests the generic symbol of Toilet Man is not just a generic symbol of ‘man’ but someone with an existential interior and spiritual core. Here, Toilet Man is on his knees, head bowed as though he, like the mass of humanity he represents is riddled with fear.
Praying Toilet Man is the international symbol for that strange anomaly, the Airport Chapel.
These are strange places where the banal and the supernatural juxtapose. Suspended ceiling tiles and contract furniture bleed into objects that possess thousands of years of cultural heritage.
There are different kinds of Chapel. Let’s say you find yourself in times of trouble at Heathrow Terminal 4 or Detroit. You’ll find yourself in what seem like rooms left over after planning, windowless and buried off an obscure corridor – what should be a cleaners cupboard. Inside, all you’ll find is a stack of prayer mats, a sign fixed to the ceiling pointing towards Mecca and a table with a bible – the only clues that something special is supposed to happen here. Otherwise, it’s a place with the absence of any normal architectural character – just an assemblage of generic building products and furniture ordered from a stationary catalogue.
Other times, they are a more elaborate affair. In Brussels, for example, there are three rooms – a Catholic, a Protestant and an Orthodox chapel. In the Catholic room, a piece of airplane wing has been refashioned into a techno-pulpit. An EU-blue Madonna is set against a rag rolled curving screen. Over in the Orthodox room we’re struck by an elaborately carved wooden alter piece. It’s so big that it must have been carved out of a tree in-situ. This overwrought medieval handcraft, touched with guiding and draped in embroidery, floats in a field of generic modernity.
There’s a third type, more likely named a Multi Faith Room or something just as linguistically awkward. Here, religious traditions smear into something less specific. The act of prayer becomes abstracted into the kind of meditation that means whatever you want it to mean. There’s a room like this at Schipol, it’s glass walled like a corporate office but it’s also decorated so that when you look at it, it looks as though you are looking at a stained glass window while squinting. It’s coloured in a hazy way, all its narrative evacuated, just the sensation remaining.
Maybe this is an embryonic origin where airports start to evolve their own spiritual rituals and acts of faith: Cargo Cults of the globally mobile. Here, passing though the arch of a metal detector might become a processional threshold, the all clear from a body scanner might articulate purity, the accumulation of air miles might model progression to higher echelons of faith.
Maybe the rituals of airport-ness are ways of confirming our secular belief systems, acts of blank devotion to the systems and networks that sustain its very existence. Perhaps that’s the reason that airports, rather than any other of the spaces of hyper-modernity come equipped with spiritual functionality – why an airports programme has this strange kink. Maybe there is something also in technological act of ascension that you are about to make into the sky that resonates with the tradition of heavenly above-cloud imagery. Is it that the contemporary airports boring-sublime is as close to the transcendent spatiality of the most significant religious structures humanity has constructed? Or maybe these spaces are an adjunct of the ever-present possibility of disaster that ghosts behind an airports glossy calm alongside armed police, fire trucks, situation rooms and emergency procedures that wait for the next inevitable tragedy.