O’Hare International Terminal, Chicago, Illinois, Perspective and Section

Adding to the “airport city” of O’Hare International, Ralph Johnson of the firm Perkins & Will designed O’Hare’s fifth and final airport terminal, serving international flights, in 1990. This huge structure was designed to handle a mass capacity of over 6,000 people per hour, thus making the terminal itself an infrastructure for mass transit. This dynamic section drawing emphasizes this complex transit structure with a high level of detail—capturing linear, hangarlike extension of the ticketing area, the terminal’s connection to the airport’s “people mover,” or light-rail train, and a network of stairs and escalators leading up and out to the street. As many critics remarked at the time of its dedication, the O’Hare terminal buildings by Johnson, as well as Helmut Jahn five years earlier, both capture the excitement of travel with a rigorous and muscular structural language that recalls the form of the great 19th-century steel and glass train stations of Europe.