My Living Room isn't Dead
What makes a space come alive?
Warm Bodies (2013) is an extraordinary film. Cliched, yet genre-bending, it is an unlikely love story set in a zombie apocalypse, sincere enough to warm (haha) anyone’s heart.
The story itself is a metaphor on (un)dead-ness, and the ‘coming alive’ that accompanies love. Little wonder, then, that it features an airport, one of the most lifeless places to exist on this planet. (I was recently layover-ed at one of those, hence this blog).
Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing inherently bad in being lifeless. Things can be stale and yet feel good (pressed flowers, for instance).
No. My attempt today is trying to figure out what makes an airport- or a place- feel ~different.
Airports are one of the most bustling locations in the world. They are a place of transition- between countries, languages, laws, time zones. An airport is always busy, and filled with busy people; crying babies at security checks, elderly wheel-chaired citizens panicking about lost luggage, layover-hangover-ed corporate professionals eyeballing lounge bar waitresses, filmy last-minute declarations of love at the gate and what not. It is beautiful, and it is human, and it is witness to all the emotions that life has to offer.
And yet, and yet- there is an air of stagnancy about the place. The built environment of an airport feels static and passive. Every time I travel through an airport, I am reminded of the feeling I get when I’m working late at my office. The lights are all switched on, the people are annoyed and eager to get out of the place, and none of us have any clue as to what’s happening outside the building.
Architecturally, airports are a microcosm, a little universe away from the city. They are functional, but that’s about it. Rarely does the built form of an airport display any evidence of belonging to a particular city. If tomorrow we were to pick Melbourne Airport up and drop it in Patna, phenotypically, it wouldn’t make too much of a difference. And this is more or less true for airports around the world, creating a brand identity of sorts. Steel grey escalators, primary-coloured signages, uniformed officers, all of which lend to the feeling of same-ness.
This is partially true for other busy places as well. Bus terminals, metro stations, hell, even offices have similar-ish layouts, thanks to globalisation and the pursuit of form after function. But they do have their occasional eccentricities- curved rooftops, and open-plan layouts and musical staircases- and, most of all- more natural light.
Think about it. Underground platforms, and the underbelly of an airport invoke a similar feeling of stagnancy. Not a bad thing, just unnerving. One of the ways that human bodies understand time is by detecting the variation in light through the day. Fixed lights feel unnatural- in airports, subways, the cubbyholes of corporate life, even in the bathroom at a restaurant. We are, on an instinctive level, just cats looking to warm our bellies in the sun.
Which is why, despite the hustle-bustle of an airport, it will always feel ~off. And why, despite being away for a month, I returned to a house that felt alive. Empty, yes, and in dire need of dusting. But alive; the three streaks of light that fell on my carpet in the morning assured me. Alive, in the reflected sunbeams that light up my bathroom for half an hour every morning. Alive, in the patterns that decorate my living room, born between the leaves of the potted monstera that had grown two new leaflets in the time I was gone.
Places come alive when they show a sense of temporality, when we can sense the passage of time. With the movement of light across a wall in a day, the conclusion of a person’s journey, the growth of a plant across time. The plants in an airport are immaculate, but always the same standard height, the people are always in the process of waiting, the light is always on, it is never night.
Airports, although transitory, are stagnant. Life, and the proof of life, is change.