“I saw what I saw very clearly. But I didn’t know what I was looking at. I had nothing to fit it into.” (V.S. Naipaul 1985: 12)

My arrival in Jamaica was unremarkable. That is, it was marked by nobody and by nothing other than my own private astonishment. I enjoyed arriving, it was a mysterious thing to do.

On emerging from the luggage retrieval hall of the Norman Manley Airport, one passes through customs. That demands an arrangement of obstacles ensuring control which is universal, expected, tolerated and therefore largely invisible. If the customs are more prominent in their work then that is due to the fact that we are talking about Jamaica, a place where crime and the criminal is part of its mythology.

As you pass through the bottleneck that is the customs’ queue and spill into administrative Jamaica you are forced, by the architecture, to pass through a corridor. This corridor is without any immediately apparent function. It flanks a large open space on one side and is closed on the other, presenting a blank wall barely used for advertising. Without it arrival would be no more than half a minute sooner but less enigmatic. People would be waiting around the doors to greet arriving passengers, and it would all be largely normal.

The corridor is a later addition to the airport, making arrival move from the main building, where James Bond arrived in Dr No, to the side. The corridor, built as a temporary building is no ornament to the monument of modernism. It makes our modern airport, together with the borken windows, the dirty concrete, the accretion of temporary buildings stuck in an arbitrary and ever-temporary fashion to the original fabric, like a tired old man, with bits and bumps growing from his body.

With the benefit of hindsight the purpose of the corridor is clear enough. The corridor is there to exercise more control; to continue the tradition of control as if it were natural, invisible. At the beginning of the corridor you are made to give up your luggage trolley, which has served you for all of thirty yards or less from the conveyor belts to the custums officers and you are encouraged to engage a porter to carry your luggage. The trolleys, being expensive items, I now understand, again with hindsight, are on no account to leave the sealed area of the airport. Visitors picking up passengers, had to be kept away from the real exit (at the beginning of the corridor), otherwise they would block up the doors. Arriving passengers would not be able to emerge from the doors, without having to squeeze through the intimate contact of seething bodies eagerly awaiting their loved ones. Moreover the trolleys need to be kept well apart from the waiting crowds as the trolleys are far too useful to Jamaican methods of commercial logistics and exchange: they are at great risk of being stolen!

Distance needs to be created physically. The only people allowed to pass through the exit corridor and use it as an entrance are the porters, the security people, and diplomats with a special pass.

One of the consequences of this is that the corridor has become the medium for the economic existence of the porters. The sole medium, as they stop being useful almost immediately at the end of the corridor where cars appear and everyone embraces, laughs and smiles, kisses and leaves, ever tolerant, unaware or sympathetic to the machinations of control they have just undergone. The point is that the corridor, here is a very discrete machine of control, very unobtrusive.

The corridor is there to make sure the trolleys are not stolen and to increase the barrier between inside and outside, making sure that no-one from the Jamaican outside can come into the airport. The fact that this measure allows a number of people to derive an income from this barrier is an added advantage.

But that is not the full life of the corridor, there is another contingent advantage, another element in the creation of Jamaican Culture above and beyond the economic survival of the porters and the protection of property. Because non-passengers are not allowed into the building -for reasons of control- the full reason for the corridor is explained as one moves along it towards the final doors at the end which are manned by guards. Suddenly you become aware of the theatre of which you are the play. To your right, through a long horizontal band of bars, there are rows and rows of fixed, bright orange plastic chairs filled with people sitting on them in carelessly formed lines, waiting for people to pass by. But they are also enjoying the wait! Arrival is, unike in other airports, an orchestrated theatrical performance. Waiting is a medium of diversion, of entertainment.

After the airport had become a social centre for the elite, it was thought as a logical extension perhaps that it would be nice to set up a television for the waiting crowds. This was a huge success. People from miles around would clog the waiting-theatre, with no purpose other than watching television. The television was taken away.

There is an emblem here. A mirror, a microcosmic mirror of the machinations of Jamaican Culture. According to a simple mechanical principle of causality reminiscent of a Tom and Jerry Cartoon, a causality moreover with absurdly complex consequences, the corridor, or waiting theeatre, provides the means of spatial exclusion, whereby certain persons are not allowed entry to certain spaces, which in itself causes an architectural geometry to emerge which is geared to that exclusion. The spatial workings of Exclusion cause all sorts of political, social, pseudo-racial, properly racial and economical side-effects to take hold, which in themselves have an accumulative emotional impact on the people undergoing them, and so are generative of culture. Small daily occurrences determined by the arrangement, modulation and dressing of spaces have a curious and accumulative emotional impact.  Sometimes humiliating, sometimes exasperating sometimes intensely human and sympathetic, large and generous, these events become the building bricks of perceptions and generalisations about a culture.

Architecture, as the background and channels of daily life, play an important role in those occurences.

Take the corridor. Its existence is there to elongate the gap between the possible exit and the actual exit to protect the trolleys: they are expensive, and to arrange the waiting crowd so that it will not block the easy exit of the passengers. The corridor and the encouragement gives porters their economic modus existendi. Furthermore the corridor provides a stage for the waiting, who are excluded from the building, for fear of theft and lack of control. The last element, also the most poetic, is the tension thus established between the waiting and the moving. When people are excluded from a space, it causes people to wait at the interface, thus creating an unusual emotional tension at the gate, reminiscent of the lobby and the lobbyists in European architectural arrangements; the gates of justice in Islam, and the modulations in sacrality in the imperial architecture of China and Japan.

Have you ever read Kafka? The Castle, for instance? It describes an architecture where geometries and spaces are in the service of administrative rituals and controls servicing the tension between the waiting and the moving, and architecture where open doors can be as impenetrable as closed ones, as walls in fact. The administration of Jamaica has had to go one step further, the controls and the rituals have to be more literally enforced in spatial terms, this is what makes the architecture so marvellous, so ripe for astonishment.