Art & Culture: A Week at the Airport by Alain de Botton

In the summer of 2009, Alain de Botton (The Consolations of Philosophy, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work) was asked to be Heathrow Airport’s first ever writer-in-residence.

In any event, my new employer was legitimately proud of his terminal and understandably keen to find ways to sing its beauty. The undulating glass and steel structure was the largest building in the land, forty metres tall and 400 long, the size of four football pitches, and yet the whole conveyed a sense of continuous lightness and ease, like an intelligent mind engaging effortlessly with complexity.

Though de Botton is respectful of the “technological beauty” he finds at Heathrow, A Week at the Airport (McLelland & Stewart) is not a song of praise to his employer’s beautiful terminal. Rather, it is a complex, though slender, examination of the way travel fits into modern human lives. “Aeroplane food stands at a point of maximum tension between the man-made and the natural,” de Botton says at one point. “Like thriller writers,” he says at another, “the security staff were paid to imagine life as a little more eventful than it customarily manages to be.”

With photographs by Richard Baker and thoughtful mediations by de Botton, A Week at the Airport brings a beautiful humanity to a structure most of us have previously given little thought. ◊


Linda L. Richards is editor of January Magazine and the author of several books.