Eero Saarinen was a brilliant architect, married to NBC News reporter, Aline Saarinen. Eero Saarinen takes it on the chin in this somewhat satirical article, for good reason, about those Dulles International Airport people mover lounges.
From The New York Times:
Dulles Airport’s Reviled ‘People Movers’ May Be Lurching Into the Sunset
A $22.5 billion redesign plan eliminates the “mobile lounges,” which were conceived as a way of making air travel more efficient. Many passengers found the opposite to be true.
Reporting from Washington
There is terrible news for those of you who really enjoy getting off a long, cramped flight and then boarding an excruciatingly slow, cramped, nausea-inducing bus — sorry, “mobile lounge” — just to escape Dulles International Airport in the Virginia suburbs of Washington.
The bus part may be going away.
On Wednesday, President Trump announced plans for a $22.5 billion redesign of Dulles, including a new hotel and an air train and central walking tunnel connecting the terminals. But the part that has received the most attention is a call to phase out the shuttles that ferry customers between the main terminal and the concourses.
For those of us who look forward to torture, the loss of the mobile lounges is a blow to our desire for sadness.
“Sometimes you will see a vehicle so unique it stops you in your tracks as your mind searches for an absent frame of reference,” the British comedian Troy Hawke said in an email. “I had this unique ‘people mover’ experience myself last year, and I for one am devastated by the removal of these flat-nose, steampunk-adjacent trundlers.”
For many, this is a cause for celebration. As Mr. Trump put it to reporters this week: “It’s an impossible airport: You go off a bus, you get into a train. You get off of a train, you get into another bus.”
The shuttles are unique to Dulles and their removal would significantly change the airport experience. Here, we will try to answer some of your burning questions about the buses.
The mobile lounges are a relic of the jet age.
The mobile lounges have existed since the airport opened in 1962. Back then, Dulles was considered a cutting-edge airport, designed by the Finnish American architect Eero Saarinen to adapt to the increasing size of jets and to limit how far passengers had to walk to board their flights.
Saarinen’s solution was a terminal where passengers would walk just a couple hundred feet from the ticket counter to a “mobile lounge,” which would then carry them directly to the plane’s door.
“In 1962, this was revolutionary,” Patrick Penfield, a professor of supply chain practice at the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University, said in an email. “Other airports experimented with similar people-mover systems but they quickly abandoned them due to the machines’ inefficiencies.”
A 1958 promotional video, produced by the husband-and-wife design team of Charles and Ray Eames, made the case for reducing walking at airports in a cartoon.
“The grand total of walking done by passengers inside the 10 major airports in 1958 would equal 100 trips across the country plus 20 walks around the world plus 4½ round-trip treks to the moon,” a narrator says in the video.
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