Witold Rybczynski Presents an Eero Saarinen Slideshow

Rybczynski's slideshows are marvelous, and this one is no exception. But it also inadvertantly underscores the problem with architecture.

Ryncsynski supports Saarinen's own view that the Finnish architecht's best building is Dulles Airport. When one drives up to Dulles, it is indeed magnificent--particularly at dawn and dusk. Its large mass is made human by its airiness.

But as a functional airport, Dulles is pretty much a disaster, in part because of the mobile lounges that are Saarinen's invention. I use Dulles between once and twice a month (Reagan National, a wonderful airport, doesn't do international flights or frequent flights to the West Coast, and Baltimore is too far away), and it is even more irritating than most airports. When one departs, the security lines move slowly, and when one arrives, it takes about 45 minutes to get from the airplane to one's car in daily parking. Among large airport terminals in the United States, O'Hare, San Francisco, Dallas and the new Detroit airport, while not as astehtically attractive as Dulles, work far better (note that I am talking about the buildings, not the air traffic sitution).