NY hotel project seeks to recapture shining moment in air travel

New York

IN 1962, architect Eero Saarinen's Trans World Flight Center at what is now Kennedy International Airport seemed poised to ascend, its 94.5- metre-wide concrete wings flexed in hopeful upstroke as a symbol of the globe-girdling Trans World Airlines.

There was just one problem.

"It was functionally obsolete the day it opened," Tyler Morse, chief executive and managing partner of MCR Development, said. He is also an avid student of the building, an official New York City landmark.

Designed by Mr Saarinen when the propeller-driven, triple-tailed Lockheed Constellation ruled th…