Vertipors, Architecture as Media

2009 marked the founding of an early passenger drone company, thus starting a new period of intensively reimagining the city through technologies of flight. In the context of civil drone integration, the term architecture first implies organization: the technical and legal reconstruction of national airspace systems for passenger and freight drones that implicates the multi-scalar reorganization of cities. This emerging drone ecosystem includes proposals for built architecture. The public-facing images of vertiports, which are station architecture for passenger drones, are conceptualized by architects. One architect involved in the schematic design of vertiports since 2018, identifies the fundamental role of emerging aviation knowledge in his work, reflecting one conception of the architect as integrator of complex programmatic demands. His account reveals how vertiport design synthesizes knowledge from real estate, infrastructure, software design and national standards, inclusive of both public and proprietary forms of knowledge. In advance of widespread vertiport construction, vertiport discourses reveal a disposition; an underlying logic about how vertiport architecture orders space. While industry commonly claims how passenger drones will democratize flight; in practice, the expansion and use of proprietary knowledge projects a series of urban enclosures through the patenting of architectural form, methods of site selection and exclusive partnership agreements granting monopoly air taxi operations. With vertiports serving as interfaces between land and sky, vertiport architecture materializes these extra-architectural practices and knowledge, serving as media for reconstructing city-regions.