makeshift

If the world's departure lounges, meanwhile, were to be seen as a hypothetical global network-city, whose citizens are tourists and business-class nomads, uniformed in tie-less suits, and whose only programmes are retail and security, then it is a city that is increasingly discontented with the culturally-evacuated homogeneity we've come to expect from it. International aiports seem to be called upon more and more to exhibit a flavour of their host city, while iconic national museums seem to exhibit more and more of the generic, non-place characteristics we associate with the airport terminal.

Are we witnessing the gradual convergence of the International Airport and the National Museum as typologies?

This may have begun with the construction of airports which pursue the articulation of difference and cultural status (Such as the Barajas terminal for Madrid designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners) but programmatically also it seems inevitable that airports will begin to become stop-off microcosms of their host city. If culture has become subservient to a 'museum economy', is it inevitable that we will see activities other than exclusively shopping filling the waiting time on the 'air side'? Will museums, theatres and art galleries begin to infiltrate departure lounges and arrival halls?

Catering to the millions of passengers catching connecting flights every year, cultural institutions would be almost like embassies or substitute experiences for the host city within the cultural blankness of the airport building. Fast-track cultural institutions will allow you to 'do' London without ever leaving the terminal building.

To start with at least, the version of events on show will be a politicised, cleaned-up, tourist-book synopsis of each city, a curation of perfect clichés which would be tainted if you were to actually visit the real thing: Chocolate museums in Brussels. Madame Tussauds at Heathrow. A Beatles museum at Liverpool. The Berlin Wall rebuilt at Tempelhof. Already, Shanghai has designated an urban quarter as 'Chinatown', in an effort to fabricate an appropriately 'Chinese' postcard image to sustain tourism in the face of the city's rampant modernisation.

Perhaps though, the airports themselves might, by introducing cultural programmes to the departure lounge, begin to aquire an authentic programmatic gravitas of their own. Fuelled by the advancing boredom of its citizens, the global airport city might generate its own cultural institutions: exhibitions of global migration statistics, or confiscated contraband in glass cases (Loisville aiport, Kentucky, already sports an impressive accumulation of abandoned baseball bats, bought at 'Loisville Slugger', "America's most famous baseball bat manufacturer" ).Can we anticipate a point at which cultural programmes in the terminal-city extend beyond cheap distilled clichés to performance events, art installations or even libraries, gardens, universities or parliaments?