I was two months shy of my seventh birthday when my family moved to Chantilly, Va., about four miles (as the 747s fly) from the main terminal of Dulles Airport. I used to be able to talk my Dad into making the short drive over to Dulles so I could watch the planes take off and land pretty frequently. Aircraft are fascinating to a boy; to my adult self, the shoes-off-please, quart-bag-of-toiletries, threat-level-orange parade of indignities that air travel has become has robbed the planes themselves of none of their mystery.
But I was equally drawn to the terminal itself, an elegant, swoop-roofed structure that would probably register as iconic even to someone who’d never seen it or heard of it before. Its design was the work of Finnish-born architect Eero Saarinen, whose remarkable career was cut short when he died of a brain tumor at the age of 51, while Dulles was still under construction. Saarinen’s body of work is the subject of “Shaping the Future,” a fascinating exhibit at the National Building Museum that I’ve overlooked until now, but which is well worth a visit while it remains on view through this Saturday.
