Between heaven and earth

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When Marcel Proust went to see the planes taking off with his flying-mad chauffeur just before the First World War, the "airports" he went to were grassy fields outside Paris. This intriguing book explores the way that special kinds of space evolved to accommodate people at the meeting-point between sky and ground.

It's about how the borrowed meadows gave way to the military-inspired aerodromes of the 1930s and 40s, and how those in turn morphed into the giant consumer complexes we know now. Not a history, not a geography, Airspaces fuses elements of both with literary theory and with personal description.

The mixture is sometimes maddening rather than satisfying, but it is reinforced by some genius-level picture research: so that you find amid the film stills and the architectural drawings, not just news photos of the Baader-Meinhof gang blowing airliners up, but also a snap of one of the founders enjoying a nice day out at the airport years earlier.

Wind determined the early shape of airspace. The man-made dragonflies Proust watched in 1912 needed to point straight into the wind in order to achieve their décollage from the earth. (This French word for take-off literally means "unsticking".) Hence the airfield was a round green space you could accelerate across in any direction, with the sheds and the hangars around the edge.

When aero-engines became strong enough to ignore the wind, this ground-plan turned inside out. The airport buildings moved to the centre, overlooked by a control tower, with one or two runways radiating out from it in a mighty A of concrete.

Later again comes the angled cluster of runways typical of a modern airport like Heathrow, described rather beautifully by David Pascoe as looking "like a set of drawing compasses laid out on a cluttered and mottled green baize table".

The terminal buildings are still in the centre, fed with passengers from underground or from roadways snaking inward in culverts; the point where the Airbuses and 747s unstick from Mother Earth has moved further away, though, because the jets are now so powerful that, close up, they would break glass walls and deafen spectators. But one thing remains constant.

Whether the airport was the Nazi-classical monster Albert Speer designed for Berlin, or Eero Saarinen's elegantly organic 1960s terminal at JFK, or Norman Foster's brilliantly functional creation in Hong Kong, or indeed any of the airports Le Corbusier designed in the course of his campaign to eliminate all visual interest from architecture - whatever the style, they all conformed to the spirit of Proust's original cry as a low-flying aircraft buzzed him on the Normandy coast. "Les temps futurs qui sont en marche!" Here comes the future!

David Pascoe puts it this way. "Throughout the century, airspace ... has provided a glimpse of how the world outside the terminal might look in 10 years or so." At the airport, the future is built in.

What this means at the moment is that our airports are previewing for us the cities we might have if we let calculations of profit and loss completely overpower the identity of particular places. Heathrow and Gatwick give us a picture of a city where everything is modular, everything is reconfigurable, and nothing has a past. That's why they're so expressive of the state of being "between" your home and your destination.

Some people love this state for its lightness, its unencumbered detachment. Pascoe's roll of airport-lovers includes Brigid Brophy, J G Ballard and a fistful of sculptors. But perhaps it would be truer to say that we all do, sometimes, since the plasticated environment is the threshold to the whole world; and sometimes it threatens us, with the menacing thought that the preview might be true, and the whole world might become like this, with nowhere to arrive that isn't another airconditioned hub.