Upon stepping out of the airplane, the travelers who’ve flown thousands of miles enter an intermediate realm, symbolically located halfway between the land they left behind and the one that will take them in. Glimpsed from a huge, recently landed aircraft, the international airport—this “non-place”—opens like an empty box at the end of a tunnel: it connects the plane with the ground in a labyrinthine succession of corridors and carpeted white gates, assorted with slightly-quilted black vinyl seats. The hallways are endowed with conveyors that work as treadmills, moving passengers who drag their luggage up to the immigration queues. Such queues, made of a series of tired bodies and overloaded backs, slither and condense up to the booths where the officers grant or deny access to the new territory. Then the other conveyors appear, like black rubber ellipses, which display bags of all sizes and shapes. The awaiting passengers congregate around them: several ellipses in a row let out a buzz that fills the entire space. Before getting out to breathe the air in the destination country, the customs officers guard the last frontier. [...]
Airport
in ENCYCLOPEDIA