Since I mentioned The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul's opening, I might as well reproduce it. It has a particular resonance now, when I've been travelling so much:
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression "As pretty as an airport."Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only known exception to this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.
They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve-jangling colors, to make effortless the business of separating the traveler forever from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveler with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the current position of Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the exit gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not.
Caught int he middle of a sea of hazy light and a sea of hazy noise, Kate Schechter stood and doubted.
The time I landed in Detroit, I remember thinking "The plane empties into the parking garage? And it has shops?"
Then again, O'Hare always struck me as the ginormous cathedral of hurry up and wait . . .
Wait until you travel to DIA. It's not ugly so much, nor even offensive; just bizzarre. During the approach, for example, your first thought will be "How did a tribe of nomadic herdsman manage to set up shop immediately next to a major airport terminal?"
Your next revelation will be, "Wait, that IS the airport terminal."
It then continues like that inside.
hey, anony, given the new art museum [both parts] they could have done MUCH worse... on the other hand, I can live with the tents, if it wasn't that you have to take a train form the nether regions. And HEY, if the train breaks? You can't get there from here.
as for the writing, ah, Douglas how you could make the English language jump backwards through flaming hoops, and enjoy itself while doing so...
hey, anony, given the new art museum [both parts] they could have done MUCH worse.
I haven't even seen the inside of that monstrosity yet, I just witnessed it going up during the construction phase when personal errands took me into the downtown area. I kept expecting little green men to exit the front door and declare "We come in war, seeing as how our aeronautics industry has clearly done their everloving best to irritate the crap out of us..."
Surprisingly, Dulles used to be a genuinely beautiful airport. Eero Saarinen designed it and he did a good job. Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, however, the authorities have seen fit to turn it into another cattle pen like all the rest.
anony-mouse: Don't forget the weird "we killed war!" mural.