Think, for a moment, of beautiful public structures and your hometown airport may not come to mind — familiarity (and patdowns and X ray machines and consigning a forgotten tube of toothpaste to the trash heap) breeds contempt.
‘Twasn’t always thus.
As infrastructure hubs, airports are in some ways the cathedrals of the 21st century: beneficiaries of organizational largesse, central to the community and rightfully (if sporadically) artful objects representing the best of human endeavor — in this case, flight, progress, innovation, speed and benevolent modernism.
The most elegant are showcased in the comprehensive new book, The Art of the Airport by Alexander Gutzmer, Laura Frommberg and Stefan Eiselin. In it, fans will find not just the usual suspects — like Montevideo, Uruguay’s Carrasco International Airport — but true outliers like the Queen Tamar Airport, in Mestia, Georgia, as pictured above, with cow. It handles only a handful of charter passengers and doesn’t even have its own three-letter airport code, which means we’re unlikely to visit.
For once, though, the book might be as good as the trip.
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