Caterina.net: Naked Airport

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{ Monday, October 11, 2004 }

Naked Airport

The frustration, humiliation and ennui of airports has been much on my mind lately. I've had to spend time in airports 24 times in the past six months, not counting the times I've gone there to pick people up. Everything about airorts is unremittingly horrible: the absurd post-9/11 security measures, the lines, the strained humor of the passengers and agents, the sterile decor, the grey air, the Immigration and Naturalization computer systems that are perpetually going down, the peculiar and vaguely accusatory questions the IN agents ask, the comfortless chairs, the meaningless and nausea-inducing luxury of the Duty Free shopping, the luggage searches... And so, this book caught my eye: Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure. It's reviewed in Airport Angst (Washington Post, free registration required):

Airports have been with us for less than a century, yet in that relatively brief period they have undergone a startling and wholesale metamorphosis. What was once the starting point for journeys that promised romance, excitement and the unknown is now, as Alastair Gordon aptly describes it, a place of "jaded realism, apathy, and paranoia." Paris tells the tale. The Le Bourget, where Charles Lindbergh ended his epic flight in 1927 -- "The grounds were neatly landscaped, with gravel walkways and lines of pollarded trees; it all looked more like a corner of the Tuilleries Gardens than an airport" -- has given way to Charles de Gaulle, a chilly, chaotic, almost unimaginably hideous mausoleum that a friend of mine calls, perhaps flatteringly, a "Third World airport."

LINK | 12:44 AM | TB

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