Airport Gothic
I started writing this, then realised that factual description of time spent in an airport was already sufficiently horrifying, and no further comment was required.
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 exception of this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs. – Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
That said, the S2 concourse (D gates) of Terminal 4 at Sky Harbor is not bad at all.
Airports are prime liminal space, which is why I love them. People sitting tailor style on the ground in business wear and charging their phones, a line of children with small faces lit by tablets, silent under headphones too large for little heads, chest-high counters often abandoned, side-scrolling orange led displays that make subtle changes to the lighting, the resonant thunk as a luggage carousel starts an empty rotation before bags tumble noisily down its chute, the omnipresent sports team made up of teen girls in matching uniforms with matching bags and matching ribbons in their hair.
I love that everything is in motion and everyone is going somewhere and sometimes it all goes to shit but mostly it works and sends people all over the world to meet family or start a job or take a break.
My local airport reminds me of a cross between a cathedral and a library; it’s all high glass ceilings casting beams of dusty light over broad expanses of silent travelers seated on evenly spaced benches. If you want something more to look at than that you can stand at a wall of windows liking at an endless field of blue and watch the planes fly into forever.
