Vintage look for Jersey Airport

Vintage look for Jersey Airport

This is a rare event - a building being redesigned to look the way it did when it first opened. The fact that the building in question is Jersey Airport's Art Deco 1937 terminal makes it even more of a welcome occasion.

With the bulky and ugly Seventies additions removed the geometric lines of the arrivals building will once again be visible for all to see and appreciate, hopefully for a long time to come thanks to the planning authority arranging for listed status.

Jersey may be one of the smaller airports in the grand scheme of things and so be more readily able to accommodate such a change (not to mention lucky to have the original building still standing) but it is still a great triumph for a beautiful design style, applied to such a commercial building. If only more airports could look like this, travelling might not be such an unpleasant experience. In fact I feel a trip to Jersey coming on right now!

'Switchover' bridge revealed

'Switchover' bridge revealed

Here is a remarkable and unusual design for a bridge connecting Hong Kong with the Chinese mainland, dreamed up (perhaps unsurprisingly) by a Dutch architectural company NL Architects. Unusual in that it takes a novel approach to dealing with an obvious difficulty - China drives on the right-hand side of the road whereas Hong Kong, being a one-time British colony still drives on the left. So at either end of any normal bridge or tunnel between them there would need to be a roadside change-over. The remarkable thing about this design is that the change is effected mid-way across by having one side of bridge directed underneath the other and so to the other side of the road before the mainland is reached, thus negating any confusion at the end(s) of the bridge. It is a truly original solution to the problem and as a design study is most interesting and elegant, but whether it would work in reality is open to question. Nevertheless I admire the Dutch architects for their approach to the commission and a lot of the philosophies outlined on their website appeal to my aesthetic nature. In my heart of hearts I doubt we will ever see such an unorthodox design made a reality but I would dearly love to see it and I congratulate the people involved on their vision.