Review: Flights of Imagination: Aviation, Landscape, Design, by Sonja Dümpelmann, and Airport Urbanism: Infrastructure and Mobility in Asia, by Max Hirsh

For more than a decade, a burgeoning body of scholarship has focused on how the advent of powered flight in the early twentieth century inspired what could be called an “epistemological” shift arising from aerial perspectives and their effects on the ground. Unpacking the cultural and visual politics behind one of the most transformative technologies of the last century, these scholarly inquiries have raised a wide of range of questions concerning spectatorship, aesthetics, mobility, globalization, urbanization, and design. It is rather surprising that this research field has gained a collective momentum only fairly recently, even though aviation and modern art, architecture, and urbanism were contemporaneous developments in the...