February 04, 2009

mccarran airport is too small

A brief note to the architect who designs the next airport in Las Vegas: make it bigger. The current McCarran airpot is way too small. Not in terms of number of gates – I’m not qualified to opine on whether this airport will need more gates. It needs to be just simply, physically bigger so that it’s in scale with the rest of Las Vegas. You can’t have a mall or a conference facility or a hotel that’s 10x normal scale – redwood-height ceilings, boulevard-width hallways, cavernous conference rooms, restaurants that seat thousands – and have an airport that’s merely “normal.” It’s too jarring, the experience is way out of scale. So at a minimum, the next version of McCarran needs to be at least as big as the United terminal at O’Hare. Preferably bigger. Much bigger.