The Sky Before Takeoff: Light Art in the World’s Airports

The airport terminal is the most thoroughly outside-less architecture in the world. Any sense of the hour is surrendered to the electronic boards at the boarding gates alone; the weather is folded away, far off, beyond the windows of the jet bridge. Bureau de change, duty-free shop and boarding information stand in a row at the same level of illumination, until every airport in every country comes to resemble every other — the homogeneous space, existing for passage and nothing else, that the anthropologist Marc Augé called a "non-place" (non-lieu). Structurally, there is no reason to stop.

Perhaps that is why the earliest move in this territory is older than one would expect. 1987, O'Hare International Airport in Chicago, United Airlines' Terminal 1. Through the underground passage linking Concourses B and C, the sculptor Michael Hayden ran a band of light 744 feet long (about 227 metres), built from 466 neon tubes: Sky's the Limit. Synchronised to music by the composer William Kraft, rainbow neon ripples along the ceiling. Riding the moving walkway, passengers spend the short interval before their next boarding inside a tunnel of light and sound. In an age when neither digital media nor LED had yet become general, the idea of "filling with light" the space of passage that is an airport was already, here, complete.

In the near-forty years since, the world's major airports have set enormous works of light and image into those homogeneous interiors. Most of them depict the sky. Cloud, weather, sunlight, birds, the four seasons, the memory of a place — things that properly lie beyond the window, called back onto the walls of a windowless waiting room. What follows travels through airports around the world, sorting those gestures into a few types.

Data Made Architecture — Los Angeles and Charlotte

First comes the "media architecture" type, which designs the airport itself as a single environment of moving image. The largest example now in operation is the Tom Bradley International Terminal at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), known as Terminal B. When the terminal reopened after renovation in 2013, seven media features had been built into the atrium of its Great Hall as part of the architectural plan from the outset. The operator is Los Angeles World Airports (LAWA); Sardi Design (Marcela Sardi) handled the design and creative direction of the media features, and MRA International oversaw the programme as a whole.

At the centre of the ensemble stands the Time Tower, some 72 feet (about 22 metres) high, wrapping the lift core on all four sides. It functions as a giant clock, and at the top of each hour the tower "opens". The other core element is Data Cloud, running on a curved screen that doubles as a departures board. It draws in live wind, temperature and precipitation data from Los Angeles and the cities it flies to, and converts them, continuously, into flowing organic form — the walls of this airport are drawing, indoors, the wind that is blowing outside right now.

The idea of making an airport's operational data the material of a work appears in a purer form at Charlotte Douglas International Airport, in North Carolina. Installed in 2018 in the Concourse A expansion, Refik Anadol's Interconnected consists of three LED media walls and a long LED ribbon running near the ceiling. Flights, baggage, parking, traffic — the operational data the airport generates minute by minute is taken as the input and translated, in real time, into flowing abstract imagery. This journal has discussed Anadol's data-driven method before, in the piece on data façades; the airport, which supplies that material — the ceaselessly updated data of movement — inexhaustibly, is also an ideal site for his practice. The lineage that turns the figures of weather and of operation directly into image is continuous with the imaging of weather data that TENKEI has followed until now.

Entrusted to a Single Artist — Amsterdam, Miami, Istanbul

At the opposite pole sits the "commissioned work" type, which entrusts one corner of a terminal to a single work by a single artist. Its exemplar is BEYOND by Daan Roosegaarde (Studio Roosegaarde), permanent in the departure hall of Amsterdam Schiphol since 2016. Across some 110 metres of wall, lenticular lenses combined with LED bring out an enormous sky recalling 17th-century Dutch painting — that low sky, hung with wet cloud, painted by Vermeer and Ruisdael. It is designed so that, just before stepping out through the aircraft window into the real sky, one passes beneath a sky that is a painting.

The same Schiphol holds another work that is hard to forget: Real Time: Schiphol Clock (2016), by the designer Maarten Baas. Inside a steel box some 3 metres high, a man in blue overalls spends twelve hours drawing the hands of a clock, erasing them and drawing them again — the whole of it filmed in real time, and that video work functions, just as it is, as an enormous clock. A man in overalls that recall a cleaner's uniform goes on redrawing the hands of time by hand, without pause. In an airport, a place governed absolutely by the hour, this is the irony of performing time itself as manual labour. This journal has treated the lineage of the clock handled as art in clocks and screens that never close; Baas's version is a point that tries to recover the texture of waiting.

At Miami International Airport, Christopher Janney — an artist, composer and architect at once — has kept Harmonic Convergence in a connecting corridor since around 2011. More than 150 panes of coloured glass, ranged in spectral order from red through to violet, carry computer-controlled LED lighting: by day natural light passes through them, by night the LEDs do, so the band of colour holds either way. Cameras and sensors then pick up the movement of people passing and answer with sound — a work interactive in both light and sound. Janney had already installed Harmonic Runway at the same airport in 1995 (later removed for security reasons); he is an artist who has spent more than twenty years turning airports into instruments of light and sound.

In a more recent case, in 2025, a kinetic sculpture some 37.7 metres high by the Turkish artist Hayri Karay appeared at the centre of the terminal at Istanbul Airport (iGA). Two mobile bodies of mirror-polished stainless steel move slowly, weaving light and shadow, changing expression according to where the viewer stands. It was conceived to mark the centenary of the founding of the republic and selected from 172 submissions. Neither video nor LED, its material is the light falling on polished metal itself — one demonstration that light art in an airport does not necessarily require a screen.

Rain That Moves and Water That Falls — Changi

A single work with an author's signature that nevertheless holds the scale of architecture — the airport that has gone on occupying that middle ground is Changi, in Singapore. As early as 2012, the Berlin studio ART+COM hung Kinetic Rain in the check-in hall of Terminal 1: 608 copper-plated "raindrops", driven by motors, travelling back and forth between abstraction and figuration over fifteen minutes, in what was then held to be the largest kinetic sculpture in the world.

Terminal 4, which opened in 2017, received Petalclouds, again by ART+COM. Along the ceiling of the central galleria, over roughly 200 metres, six cloud-shaped sculptures are choreographed by a great number of motors, rising and falling like a slow wave, parting and regathering into a single formation. Music by the Icelandic musician Ólafur Arnalds is synchronised to the movement. Changi, then, has entrusted its ceiling to the same studio twice.

And when Jewel, the complex adjoining Changi, opened in 2019, what was set at its centre was not image but rain. Through the dome of glass and steel designed by the architect Moshe Safdie, water falls some 40 metres from the opening at its apex to the Forest Valley below — the HSBC Rain Vortex, the tallest indoor waterfall in the world. Design and engineering were carried out by WET, the firm known for the Dubai Fountain. At night the waterfall turns into a work of light and sound, imagery projected onto the curtain of water controlled at the apex. Raindrops in motion, water falling — Changi can fairly be called an airport that has been consistently obsessed with drawing indoors the weather that ought to lie outside the window.

Setting a Point into the Non-Place

Line up this many cases and the makers still do not converge on a single studio. There is a sculptor who bends neon tubes, a media artist who turns airport data into image, a designer who performs a clock as twelve hours of manual labour, an artist who lets light fall on polished metal. The countries are scattered as well, from Chicago to Amsterdam, Miami, Istanbul and Singapore. Even so, two poles come into view across these works. At one pole is the "media architecture" type, as at LAX and Charlotte, which designs the structure of the terminal itself as an environment of moving image. At the other is the "commissioned work" type, as at Schiphol and Miami, which bores a single work by a single artist into the space of passage. To the latter lineage belongs the case of Hamad International Airport, which installed video by Bill Viola and Jenny Holzer permanently (For Those Passing Through). Changi's moving sculptures and falling water sit between the two — holding the scale of architecture while standing as single works with an author's signature.

But one subject runs beneath every type. Sky, weather, light, time, the memory of a place — all of them things that properly belong "outside", and that the design philosophy of the non-place has worked to erase. The light of an airport functions as a device for drawing that erased exterior back into a windowless interior. Into the homogeneous space of waiting, into the ma — the interval — that extends through it without end, it sets a single point for those passing through. Just as the tenkei of an ink-wash landscape brings the view to life by brushing a small figure or a small boat into a vast expanse of blank space.

And what must not be forgotten is that the last piece of that tenkei is the passenger: the one who stops in front of the screen or the light and spends the short time before takeoff looking up. Whoever walks the tunnel of light at O'Hare, whoever watches the man with the clock at Schiphol, becomes for a moment, beneath a moving sky, a point that brings the landscape of the non-place to life.

Sources

1. fig.001Los Angeles Airport (LAX) — Moment Factory
2. fig.002Interconnected, Charlotte Douglas — Refik Anadol Studio
3. fig.003BEYOND — Studio Roosegaarde
4. fig.004Real Time: Public Works — Maarten Baas
5. fig.005Harmonic Convergence, Miami — Christopher Janney (Janney Sound)
6. fig.006iGA ART — Istanbul Airport
7. fig.007Petalclouds, Changi Terminal 4 — ART+COM Studios
8. fig.008Rain Vortex — Jewel Changi Airport
9. [9]Michael Hayden, “Sky’s the Limit” (O’Hare, 1987) — Wikipedia
10. [10]Kinetic Rain, Changi Terminal 1 — ART+COM Studios
11. [11]LAX Tom Bradley International Terminal — Sardi Design (SEGD)
12. [12]Jewel Changi Airport — Safdie Architects

Operations Record

OPERATOR

Various airport operators (LAWA, Charlotte Douglas, Schiphol, Miami-Dade, iGA, Changi Airport Group, etc.)

LOCATION

Los Angeles, Charlotte, Amsterdam, Miami, Istanbul, Singapore

MODEL

Operator commission — Permanent installations commissioned by terminal operators and public-art programmes from a wide range of artists and studios — Michael Hayden, Sardi Design, Refik Anadol, Studio Roosegaarde, Maarten Baas, Christopher Janney, Hayri Karay, ART+COM, WET, and others; this piece surveys several airports

CADENCE

Permanent and year-round at each site (O’Hare 1987, Miami 2011, Changi T1 2012, LAX 2013, Schiphol 2016, Changi T4 2017, Charlotte 2018, Jewel 2019, Istanbul 2025)

SPEC

e.g. O’Hare’s 466 neon tubes over 744 ft, LAX’s seven media features, Schiphol’s ~110 m BEYOND wall, Istanbul’s ~37.7 m kinetic sculpture, Jewel’s ~40 m indoor waterfall

SINCE

1987

STATUS

Active

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