TWA Flight Center

The TWA Flight Center (also known as the Trans World Flight Center or TWA Terminal) is a building at John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) in Queens, New York, United States. Designed by Eero Saarinen and Associates for Trans World Airlines (TWA), the building was completed in 1962 and operated as an airport terminal for four decades. The building's main section, the headhouse, was repurposed as part of the TWA Hotel in 2019. The headhouse is flanked by two towers added for the hotel and is partially surrounded by Terminal 5 (T5), a terminal for JetBlue. The headhouse has a thin shell concrete roof, shaped like a set of bird's wings and supported by four Y-shaped piers. Inside is an open, three-level space with large windows; the windows overlooked the tarmac before Terminal 5 and the TWA Hotel's towers were built. The TWA Flight Center also includes two tube-shaped, red-carpeted departure and arrival corridors extending outward from the headhouse. These formerly connected to the TWA Flight Center's detached "flight wings", which contained the gates. The flight wings were demolished and the corridors were truncated in the 2000s, during the development of Terminal 5. Saarinen's firm was hired to design the TWA Flight Center as part of a 1955 master plan for Idlewild (now JFK) Airport. After years of design and modeling work, construction began in June 1959, and the TWA Flight Center was dedicated on May 28, 1962. It originally had one flight wing; Roche-Dinkeloo, a successor firm to Saarinen's company, designed a second flight wing, which opened in 1970. Various other additions took place over the years, and domestic flights were moved to the Sundrome in 1981. After TWA sold its assets to American Airlines in 2001, the terminal closed. There were proposals to refurbish the original structure as...