"It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression 'as pretty as an airport'. Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk, and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.
They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve jangling colours, to make effortless the business of separating the traveller for ever from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveller with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the current position of Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the departure gates, presumably on the assumption that they are not" – Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea Time Of The Soul
(In all honesty, I suspect I'm guilty of producing several websites that could easily be accused of those same faults – though I don't _think_ I've ever accidentally sent anyone to Murmansk…)
They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve jangling colours, to make effortless the business of separating the traveller for ever from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveller with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the current position of Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the departure gates, presumably on the assumption that they are not" – Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea Time Of The Soul
(In all honesty, I suspect I'm guilty of producing several websites that could easily be accused of those same faults – though I don't _think_ I've ever accidentally sent anyone to Murmansk…)