Dulles Airport Is the Iran War
The difference between planning and wishing
Like any right-thinking resident of the DC area, I hate Dulles Airport. Aside from the main terminal, it looks like a mall that never quite recovered from Covid. It forces travelers to make a trip-before-their-trip, with a bus typically leading to a train to a tram to a shuttle to a moving walkway (broken since 1973) and ultimately to this Dr. Seuss-looking bit of nonsense:
That thing — which looks a camel fucked an Airstream trailed — is “mobile lounge”. The concept, as envisioned by architect Eero Saarinen in 1958, is that before a flight, passengers would unwind in a mobile lounge while being whisked directly to their flight. It’s a halcyon vision: Gentlemen in their sports jackets, women in calf-length dresses and pearls, children shutting the fuck up in grand ‘50s style and everyone smoking, smoking, SMOKING! It’s the rare Jet Age vision of progress that doesn’t involve kids being sprayed in the face with DDT.
In practice, though, the lounges are an annoying bottleneck. These days, people don’t want to hang out in a featureless box in an airport — the vibe in the lounges is less “Playboy Club” and more “Shipping Crate Full Of Viruses From Exotic Lands”. They’re cramped, featureless, and the floors have been covered with a layer of hardened gum since the ‘90s. They make a city bus seem like a luxury cabin on a Gilded Age yacht, and they don’t say “infrastructure of a great world city” so much as “mobile home designed while on acid”.
