design for waiting room

What are you waiting for? Step inside, immerse yourself in speculation

For my flight to board

For the call

For the alarm to go off

For my number to come up

For it to arrive

For the end of the day

To drown

For hell to freeze over

For my comeuppance

For life to get better

To hear the answer

To find out

To die

For my dinner

For a print to appear

For a cheque

For the great leap forward

For the end of the world

For a delivery

For a train

For a waiter

Until you come back to me

For my day to come

For it to go

For the cover of darkness

For my just desserts

For my ship to come in

For the surprise

For the end

For the bell

For the time to be right

missing you

waiting the story

From: EUJet <replies@atmyside.com>

Reply-To: replies@atmyside.com

To: <rosa.ainley@onetel.net>

Date: Thursday, November 18, 2004 12:09 pm

Subject: Transcript:ID-50--52101-75296--P

Nichola:Hello rosa ainley. Welcome to eujet.com . How can I help you.

rosa ainley:Can you tell me what waiting areas exist at the airport please? Are there designated waiting areas? Smoking/non-smoking? Women-only?

Nichola:There is a small cafe in the terminal building. It is an open plan waiting area and it is all non smoking.

rosa ainley:thank you

SYSTEM:Visitor closed the call.

If you would like to reply to this transcript you may do so by either pressing reply from your email program or by clicking here <mailto:replies@atmyside.com?subject=REF:ID-50--52101-75296--P>   to start a new message

ISO

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ISO

Every country in the world has a 2-letter abbreviation code (ISO 3166) which is defined by ISO (International Organisation for Standardization).

'Doing more waiting than I bargained for. The train was late at Ramsgate so I missed the hourly 'fast shuttle' airport bus. Fifty minutes to wait then at Ramsgate station. The waiting room is between the Ladies toilet and the main station concourse. It smells of pine disinfectant. The parquet floor is layered thick with dirty varnish. There are two rails of vandal-proof metal seating for four and six bare striplights. A CCTV camera perches in a corner, pointing down to the patch of damp coming through.

'Missed the queues? They're all at Gatwick'

The KIA brand is about avoiding the queues that can dominant the processing experience in larger, more central airports. Gatwick, the nearest 'rival' is, in keeping with advertising industry's penchant for naming the competition, namechecked several times: 'Something got on your Gatwick?' Less waiting time is the fundamental idea.

In fact, waiting time at all airports has lengthened. Elaborated security procedures mean that the one-and-a-half hour required gap between check-in and departure time has been extended to two hours. Queuing, for the sake of bureaucracy and consumption, can often play a role filling that time. The KIA experience then means less queuing and more undifferentiated waiting time on the outward journey with the sensation of saving time on the return.

'If you walk round this pillar a thousand times you can pretend you're in Gatwick'

A waiting room, which may exist only as an arrangement of chairs, takes the occupant out of circulation, into a holding pattern, into (assumed) safety. Waiting room, in relation to transport facilities, used to have a distinctly gendered spatial aspect to it. Ladies in the unfortunate situation of having to travel unaccompanied could retire to the waiting room to be safe from unwelcome attention. Women-only carriages on trains were discontinued once decision-makers realised such spaces could become easily identifiable targets. Women-only waiting rooms still exist in some railway stations but are now generally locked, possibly to avoid the 'sitting duck' effect or as a precaution against vandalism. The ladies' waiting room sometimes operates as an anteroom to the Ladies toilet, an extra modesty barrier between bodily function and the public realm and the crush of other passengers.

 

Web posting (KIA opened 1 September 2004)

Kent International Airport by Dave Stanley

10 October 2004

This airport was previously known as London Manston, which is a bit of a joke because of how far it is from London. However, with a name change, new terminal and new budget airline EUJet has started to raise its profile. I travelled through there on the way to/from Amsterdam. The airport is small which works to its advantage. Check in was very fast and the staff very helpful. The car park is right outside the terminal entrance and is very cheap (£5/day or £20/week). The small cafeteria is good and clean. The aircraft are right out side the terminal so no long bus rides or endless walkways. On the way back it took less than 10 minutes to reach my car from the time the wheels touched the ground (I had no luggage). All in all, a very good experience.

IATA

(IATA) Airport Codes

These airport codes are another standard which is updated and designated by the International Air Transport Association (IATA).

The KIA A-Z of waiting is missing:

B for Belfast

H for Helsinki

I for Istanbul

L for London

O for Oslo

Q for Quimper

R for Rome

U for Utrecht

V for Valencia

W for Warsaw

X for Xante

Y for Yerevan

Z for Zagreb

The traveller is always in transit, between, on the edge, outside time yet completely focused on it. Their presence in the waiting room is entirely dependent upon time. The space exists only because they are there. It's multi- and non-functional, a blank, its purpose written by those who use it.

 

'In the waiting room someone is sleeping, a couple wave at a departing plane, one man works his laptop and mobile simultaneously, a group of middle-aged men who could be doing a role-play of corporate hospitality laugh too loudly as if they were drinking. There's chatting, eating, meeting, playing with mobiles (reprogramming, changing tones), comparing holiday purchases, food: people examine it, order it, wait for it, consume it.'

 

I wait

I am somewhere between anticipation expectation boredom languor, on the watershed between anxiety and excitement, on the cusp of desire and apprehension.

World Area Codes (WAC)

Numeric codes used to identify geopolitical areas such as countries, states, provinces, and territories or possessions of certain countries. The codes are used within the various data banks maintained by the Office of Airline Information (OAI) and are created by OAI.

The airport may no longer considered to be full of drama, except on the mundane-as-extraordinary axis. In this way, marketing becomes more complex, double-edged. It's a double bind: air travel is still sold on its excitement factor while we're reminded how everyday it is, how ordinary it's become and us how cosmopolitan. Waiting room as shopping mall - airport as another destination in a busy shopping schedule persists.

It could be a stab at the modern - internet and spurious charges - which has led to the introduction of a '£10 per person non-refundable transaction fee' for bookings made at the airport sales office, rather than online.

Air travel somehow still reminds us that we are modern; making it cheap and local more so. KIA's second selling point is low fares. 'Join the low fares Jetset' captures a similar but possibly unintentional retro as The Jetsons. Yet now that it's just like catching the train it can't be special anymore. In this confusion of transition, the train becomes the smooth luxury (time-rich?) option, Eurostar the plane in the centre of town. With its own waiting room.

 

'In an airport the waitee is captive, doesn't need to be captivated because they're not going anywhere until you take them. They wait for something they want from you, that's already paid for. They're not in a position to look for it anywhere else. Stuck here, waiting on time slot, sitting underneath the monitor advising of arrivals and departures.

 

time travel

Air travel is time travel, through time zones. The airport is very grounded in a present that will, if you wait long enough, transport you jet-propelled into the future. Airport is a place of transitory, migratory occupation: moving from the timeless to the time-dependent. The waiting room, wherever, whatever it is, validates the passing of time by awarding it a venue. It's all about time. Time means waiting. It can be suspended or replayed in representational form but it doesn't wait.

 

'The waiting area and the café are one. The floor-to-ceiling window offers the only outside view. There's nothing else to look at and not much of that - only one landing all afternoon. Even the white paintwork of the newly landed plane doesn't cut through the afternoon gloom late in the year. Only the fluorescent vests of the ground staff moving the stairway into place stand out. Guided by the paddles the plane has taxied to a stop in front of a barrier of interlocking red and white blocks. The perspectival distortion of the photograph gives the illusion of movement, as though the plane was hurtling backwards. Heading simultaneously into the present and the future.'

 

Outside is the future, liftoff, the hardware, the technology. The separation, though often fashioned of transparent glass, needs to be stark. Inside is the endless now; time drips inexorably and unmoving.

Runway Lengths

 

'Stuck here waiting in the Starbucks franchise, bright lights no city, all-expense-spared dual-purpose area. KIA dispels any illusion that cheap flights are somehow classy, fun, bright, young, friendly. We wait for low-budget short-haul flights in barely made-over second - or third-hand planes. We're doing on the cheap and the waiting area unsparingly reminds us of this.

 

But there is, after all, somewhere else to wait. A couple of banks of fixed seating, metal and plastic bolted to the floor in the main concourse. People sitting here look like they're waiting at the dentist or for a verdict, not for a flight to Madrid or for their beloved.'

Holiday travel is preceded by another journey. Progress through the bureaucratic journey of air travel is marked by advancing through a series of waiting rooms, each with identificatory passes: ticketholder; legal bearer of valid passport; baggage claim; parking ticket.

Runway Elevation

 

'Everyone's waiting, the staff most of all because the promise of the end of a day's work is not such an exciting destination as D for Dublin E for Edinburgh. For the traveller what's happening now is secondary: the deferred, the anticipated is the main event. The building - so empty, so full of space - is waiting too, for hoards of travellers avoiding queues.'

 

'And waiting means hurrying on ahead, it means regarding time and the present moment not as a boon, but an obstruction; it means making their actual content null and void, by mentally overleaping them. Waiting we say is long. We might just as well - or more accurately - say it is short, since it consumes whole spaces of time without our living them or making any use of them as such.' Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (1924)

Rosa Ainley is a writer and editor currently exploring ways to add sound to the mix of text and image. design for waiting room is one strand of a series on waiting space. She was writer-in-residence at Orchard House in Sussex for an archiTEXTS project for Architecture Week 2005 (architectureweek.org.uk).