I grew up with the Jinnah Terminal.

Not in the way many Pakistanis have done — as a place of departure and arrival — but as a building that existed, quite literally, in the background of my childhood. Architectural drawings of the unbuilt airport project lay open at home; conversations about structure, materials and deadlines peppered dinner conversations.

As the daughter of the project’s chief architect, Mukhtar Husain, I first encountered the airport as an idea. Long before I understood what architecture was, I understood the importance of this building as it took shape in front of my eyes. Entrenched within the narrative of my childhood, it eventually became familiar to millions.

GROWING UP WITH A TERMINAL

Airports are among the few civic spaces where private emotions play out in full public view. Departures fracture families across continents; arrivals collapse distance and separation into moments of joy. In a country shaped profoundly by migration and diaspora, these rituals carry particular weight. For millions of Pakistanis, these moments have taken place against the backdrop of the Jinnah International Airport terminal in Karachi.

Since its inauguration in the early 1990s, the terminal has served as Pakistan’s principal gateway to the world. Generations of travellers passed through its concourses — students leaving to study abroad, workers heading to the Gulf, families welcoming relatives home. The building marks the threshold between Pakistan and the world, while being steadily adapted and modified to fit changing policies, technologies and institutional priorities.

For the architect daughter of the Jinnah Terminal’s chief architect, the Karachi airport is not just a place of arrivals and departures but a living archive of memory, design and family history

For the architect daughter of the Jinnah Terminal’s chief architect, the Karachi airport is not just a place of arrivals and departures but a living archive of memory, design and family history

For me, it has always existed simultaneously as a piece of national infrastructure and as a deeply personal landscape. I have returned to it year after year since first leaving Karachi as a student nearly 30 years ago. I became an architect myself, living and working abroad and, eventually, a mother travelling with my son; design is now as much a part of his childhood as it was mine. We move through the same halls that once existed only as hand-drawn blueprints on our dining table, hearing echoes of the nearly-forgotten conversations that shaped them.

My son, who only knows Pakistan from his brief, annual visits to Karachi, has come to know this building through stories — his grandfather’s recollections of its making — and through the tactile reality of the spaces themselves.

When he told his grandfather how much he loved the marble fountain on the way to the satellite, my father explained to him how he had wanted to create a peaceful respite after every traveller’s stress going through the immigration line. The carved wooden screens, the carpets lining the check-in hall, the scale of the geometric chandeliers matching that of the halls themselves: ideas initially abstract, made concrete into spaces we encounter, materials we question, and experiences we have lived through and recognise.

The terminal continues to operate not only as a gateway between countries, but as a bridge between........

© Dawn (Magazines)