This Futuristic Design Of The TWA Lounge At JFK Airport In The 1960s Remains A 2001 Space Odyssey Movie

The airport is where you arrive and depart. It’s like a hospital, but without the certainty and the escape of anaesthesia. Something might go wrong and the routine operation ends with a slip of the scalpel or a martyr’s bomb The airport is where you wait, get separated from your bags and of your own free queue to have your identity ascertained and reasons challenged by armed and dangerous officialdom.

But look at that design, the gorgeous contours of ethereal curves at the Trans World Flight Center airport terminal at New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport (formerly Idlewild Airport). You want to touch the walls as your moved from here to there with maximum efficiency and minimal fuss. Many modern airports are designed to replicate shopping centres, which in turn are designed to replicate airports, only without any sense of purpose and thrill of seeing people for the first time and others maybe for the last. The least an airport can do it look like a portal to a new beginning. The gorgeous, gull-wing shaped TWA Flight Center was part of the escape.

Opened in 1962, the TWA terminal at JFK was designed by Eero Saarinen (August 20, 1910 – September 1, 1961), a Finnish-born devotee to form and function. Photographed by Nick DeWolf.

h/t: flashbak