Why are airport carpets so damn lame?
We expect an answer
Next time you snooze on Hartsfield-Jackson airport's floors while you wait for the red eye to Quad City International, ask yourself: Do these carpets include any hidden homages to Atlanta? Could airport carpets be considered the world's prayer mat? And what do the good people in Dalton think about modern airport carpet design?
Surprisingly these issues, which everyone discusses on a Monday morning, missed our eye when they were first covered in January by Icon:
In the wake of 9/11, security became such an issue in airports around the world that carpet manufacturers found it increasingly difficult not just to install carpets but to maintain them. Even in Dalton, Georgia, the Mecca of carpeting that provides 45 percent of the world's commercial carpet, there are grumbles of discontent. Tom Ellis at Tandus Carpets laments the fact that, due to increased security checks and stringent regulations on what can be brought into an airport, his workers often have little more than four hours a day to install or replace carpeting. Since the work has to be done at night, the cost of overtime alone causes costs to rapidly spiral.
The result is that airports are rapidly becoming faceless processing sheds with hard surface floors providing a characterless "international" style that is as opposed to interpretation as it is repellent to the foot. When it comes to airport carpeting the terrorists won. There is a grim irony in this, for if airports can be seen as temples to travel, gateways to other worlds, then airport carpets are the vast prayer mats upon which we all genuflect. Why else, when we enter airport security, are we forced to take off our shoes?
Very, very deep. We're still out on whether or not Hartsfield-Jackson's special noise-reduction carpets — which in 2008 were described in painstaking detail here — rise to the level of prayer mat. Anyways, 10,000 karma points if you're reading this at the airport and send me a photo of the carpets.
(H/T to Andisheh Nouraee, the textile industry's greatest champion)