Explore the TWA Terminal, a Pristine Time Capsule From 1962

Right now, a team of digital scanning whizzes is back in their Florida lab, making a digital 3D model of the TWA Flight Center. Last week, while the staff and their equipment were hard at work recording every curve, bend, window, and facade of Eero Saarinen's 1962 terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport, photographer Max Touhey was granted access. That much free time inside the historic, beloved landmark is hard to come by—especially with a camera in hand—given that it has been off limits to the public since 2001 and is set to undergo redevelopment into a boutique hotel.

More coverage of the TWA Terminal:
Capturing JFK's Space-Age TWA Terminal Before It's Redeveloped
JetBlue May Turn Eero Saarinen's TWA Terminal Into a Hotel
Fly Back and See Eero Saarinen's TWA Terminal in Its Prime

The TWA Flight Center holds significance as a building for several reasons. As a work of architecture, the terminal has the distinction of being legendary architect Saarinen's last building, as it was completed posthumously in 1962.

In 2011, architecture critic Alexandra Lange, whose column now runs on Curbed.com, wrote about her experience visiting the terminal during Open House New York:

Saarinen's modernist iconoclasm was not just in the bird-like shape, so obvious to my four-year-old that he spent most of the visit searching for the eyes, the legs, the beak to go with the outspread wings. It is also in the building's pure, Beaux Arts symmetry. Those stone staircases were made for the sweep of a long gown, not the bump of wheelie suitcases. Even without the photographers, moving across the white slopes feels like a film trick, one in which you (the star!) are still and the scenery flows around you. Saarinen also accomplished the neat trick of putting the services on the inside, in dark areas that the French would have called poche. Today's airports put the people in the middle, away from the light and any sense of exterior orientation. The bulk is given over to ticketing and security, baggage and shops, so that people get only a narrow path. It's the opposite at TWA: the perimeter is for humans.

That rare freedom for travelers to explore was also observed by Lori Walters, one of the researchers on the scanning team, though she made note of it in contrast to earlier decades, in which flying was reserved for the wealthy.

The opening of the TWA Flight Center in all its jet-age splendor marked a shift in the history of air travel in which middle-class Americans could now afford to fly. Clearly, the terminal's heyday coincided with the golden age of flying, in which travelers were restricted neither by economic class nor security concerns.

Finally, the TWA terminal is significant to historical preservationists, as the journey to its 2003 landmarking was deemed one of the nation's most inspiring preservation stories. In many ways, Walters and ChronoPoints's scanning and education project is a continuation of that dedication to preserving and remembering the building in some form.

It's a special place for architecture and midcentury design loversand photographers. Touhey said of his experience shooting:

Even when I'm really excited to shoot a space, if it stands the hype the excitement still drops off at a certain point. But TWA is different. You can stand in 100 different places and still be in awe. The interplay of curves is really fascinating and changes dramatically depending where you're looking from. One of my favorite features is of two sharply angled forms on both sides of the "passion pit," two aerodynamic shapes in a sea of curves. I could almost hear a plane taking off! Now I'll have to see what my parents remember from their TWA days when I share the images.

At this point, it's still unclear how the terminal may change once it is converted into a hotel.

What's promising is that many of the building's interior features will likely be kept for their charm and their existing uses on the hospitality front. Still, it will never be entirely the same as it is right now.