Happy Landings! A Frequent Traveler - George Pendle - Calls Attention to the Colorful World of Airport Carpet
If you are like me, the first thing you do when you walk into a new place is take a good look at the carpet.
What? You don’t?
Well, I don’t think it’s strange, and neither does George Pendle. Mr. Pendle is an author, and the founder of a blog called, Carpets for Airports.
The blog is all about the carpet (or lack of it) in airports around the world. Visitors to the blog are greeted with a message that lets them know they are in for an experience that is as much comic monologue as travelogue:
“From Santiago to Sydney, from Bishkek to Boston, the airport carpet sings out its inviolable song, a sign of man's refusal to go drably into that dark night of international travel.
Such aesthetic intimacy, poetry and passion, has for too long gone unnoticed by the modern traveler.
Until now”.
On Carpetsforairports.com, visitors spin the globe, click on any of the red dots, and voila! – pictures appear of carpet from airports around the world. Not pictures of airports and carpet, or people and carpet, or even feet and carpet. Just carpet all by itself.
Sometimes, as in the case of Bangkok International, there’s a picture of hard surface flooring accompanied by a commentary on why it would be better if the airport had carpet.
“BKK shamelessly apes the geometric patterns found on airport carpets across the world, but has the gall to reproduce them in the medium of terrazzo. Do the airport authorities really think we can’t tell the difference? A large crack in this despicable flooring suggests that even the ground beneath it is repelled.”
The tongue-in-cheek commentary is written by George Pendle, a frequent traveler who has authored several books, including a fictional biography of American President Millard Fillmore. Pendle’s arch descriptions are highly entertaining, like this one about the somewhat disturbing carpet in Singapore’s Changi airport:
“One of the most psychologically terrifying carpets in the world, SIN’s vertiginous pattern was designed to give anyone who walks on it the impression of falling out of a window of a skyscraper in the brightly-lit Downtown Core, Singapore’s business district.”
On why he started Carpets for Airports, Pendle told the Los Angeles Times, [note: a few more details are captured in You can also read more in "Pendle's Airport Carpet Blog".
"Flooring is considered mundane. We're all too busy looking at the sky and the planes to look at the ground beneath us. So I thought it would be a fun experiment to compare and contrast airport carpets from around the world.”
Pendle welcomes photographs to the site, offering, "All carpets gratefully received. All photographs fully credited."
Calling all carpeteers…
~Bethany
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