Making Connections

Frequently voted the world’s best airport, Changi recently upped the ante with a new $1.25 billion hub which has become a city attraction in itself. Designed by Safdie Architects—who’ve earned their reputation with grandiose, cutting-edge urban projects like the city’s tower-topping, boat-shaped SkyPark, seen in the film Crazy Rich Asians, and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. Jewel is part mall, part entertainment center, part art installation. Its heart is a seven-story, free-standing waterfall surrounded by terraced gardens of more than 100,000 trees and shrubs

This walk-through gallery space opened in 2012 and has some impressive partnerships for its twice-yearly exhibits; past collaborators include the Musée Rodin. Currently, it has paired with the Musée du Quai Branly–Jacques Chirac with paintings and artifacts in a tribute to African, Oceanic, and Native American cultures.

The first museum to open a branch in an airport, Holland’s popular Rijksmuseum has set up this tasteful satellite, which features ten Dutch works, most from the seventeenth century, including Rembrandt’s cheerful Laughing Young Man. (It was likely painted by a pupil but supposedly depicts the famed artist.) It is open twenty-four hours a day and free. Spend about five minutes admiring each piece, and you are an hour closer to your flight Located past security, it sits between Lounge 2 and 3.

Everywhere you look in the sprawling T2 international terminal are mind blowing details, color, sounds, magic—in the form of eleventh-century artifacts, Nagaland totems, Bollywood prints, and eighteen-foot-tall dioramas pieced together by 1,200 nationwide artists during a six-year project. The goal, as the name “Jaya He” indicates, is delivering “Glory to Thee” for the airport’s fifty million annual visitors. Half-hour tours are available if you call ahead.

Canada’s greatest airport is filled with breathtaking art from First Nations traditions of the region: giant cedar carved totems, and cobalt-blue glass poles representing rivers. Above the enormous aquarium, the Orca Chief and the Kelp Forest are etched from glass. Keep an eye out for the annual displays of local art students who’ve won scholarships from the airport’s ongoing YVR Art Foundation.

Opened in 1980, the SFO Museum features twenty themed galleries that pepper the walkways and overlook escalators on either side of security. Most are rotating exhibits, such as Alejandro Durán’s Washed Up, which ponders the effect of plastic on the environment (through December 5). Another choice is the Aviation Museum & Library in the public-access area of the International Terminal, where there’s a 1930s-style passenger lobby and dozens of exhibits.

A meager desert village until the oil boom, Doha has built an airport that doubles as a museum featuring a couple dozen oversize sculptures and bronze-figure playgrounds that are impossible to miss. The heart of it all, set where the concourses meet, is the slumping Untitled (Lamp/Bear), a twenty-ton, twenty-three-foot-tall bronze bear made by Urs Fischer. It’s sure to get a lot of attention during the 2022 World Cup here.

A car can be a canvas, according to Albuquerque’s Lowriders and Hot Rods: Car Culture of Northern New Mexico. The exhibit celebrates Nuevomexicano culture with an array of photos (with help from the New Mexico History Museum) and a 1964 Chevy Impala. The exhibit rotates every three months and joins the 113-piece permanent art collection of Native American, Hispanic, and Southwestern works overseen by Max Baptiste, who has taken on the airport’s newly added role of art curator.

In the early 1960s, architect Eero Saarinen transformed New York’s then-named Idlewild Airport by adding the space-age, swooping design of the Trans World Airlines terminal. Now, after an eighteen-year hiatus—thankfully, no one had the heart to tear it down—it has reopened as the TWA Hotel. You can party like it’s 1962 by having a drink in the red-carpeted lounge, getting a room (a four-hour stay is $149), or peeking at old TWA uniforms assembled by the New York Historical Society