Just getting all the parts to work together seems overwhelming indeed, it did overwhelm British Airways last month at Heathrow, outside London, when Terminal 5, an eight-billion-dollar structure that was supposed to transform Heathrow from a congested tangle into a place that would thrill passengers with the joy of air travel, all but shut down on its opening day, when a computerized baggage system malfunctioned.

NEWYORKER: Situation Terminal

Art Gensler, one of the founders of the architecture firm Gensler, which designed the revamped terminal, noted that they kept much of the original structure of the building.

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Paul Andreu designed the first terminal at Charles de Gaulle, north of Paris, as a doughnut-shaped structure with glass tubes crossing through the middle, but when it came time to expand the airport, in the nineteen-eighties, only a few years after the first part was finished, his futuristic form seemed more like a cartoon than like a functional building, and more conventional terminals were ordered up.

NEWYORKER: Situation Terminal