Ye Olde Pop-up “The Plane & Pub” Pub
Here you can see flight EZ4531 to Madrid walking through the Dog & Partdridge at SXF, with a delay of about 15min.
I always look forward a little to this strange surrealist juxtapostion, by mytonomie, of plane through pub. Both, passengers and pub, seem to have lost their hull (Hull?). It reminds me of the jet engine crushing through a suburban home in Donnie Darko. There’s got to be a space-time portal in here somewhere leading to the beginning of a mind blowing narrative.
Check out the Tudor detailing and the micron-thin carpet, crisply bisected by the terminal flooring. Is it to assure that the cleaning contractor can clean right through, for insurance purposes, or because they haven’t come up with a carpet that can withstand the steps of 6.6 mio annual passengers that pass through this pub a year? That’s got to be a record, and talk about Laufkundschaft.
They could have gone a bit further as far as the ceiling’s concerned, but the overhead continuation of the deckplate and banks of fluorescent tubes function as a reassuring cue that I’m actually still in a building made almost entirely of prefabricated components which is gonna be razed in couple of short years, ye olde pub and all. Still, think how cool it would have looked if the stark differentiation of the floor’s contrasting surfaces had been mirrored on the ceiling.
The old retail trick of painting the ceiling black would have helped as well, as an economic solution. Then again, seems to me the whole assemblage speaks of an attitude that you describe, that it will all be gone when bbi opens anyway.
I think it would have been cooler if they’d actually built an entire perfect replica of a run-down stale beer and piss-smelling British pub out of brick and mortar and then built the airport around it afterwards, preserving the pub’s structure like with that restaurant at Potsdamer Platz. Then you could have had a moment as you are going through the airport and find yourself in a pub, of going “oh, that’s interesting, I guess they had to preserve the pub for historical reasons”; but then a second moment of going “hey wait a minute…”