Wait, is there a Mr National?
I dunno, but there is a President Reagan... that is, Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
National Airport was already named for a President - not sure why it needed to carry the moniker of a second.
Dulles does need renaming, not only for its association with an evil person, but also because many people confuse it with a certain city in N. Texas.
Not everybody thinks Reagan was wonderful either.
Maybe we ought to follow the London system that has been brought up and just name the airport after the exact locale where the airport is. Stansted, Luton, and Gatwick are villages/towns not people. You could have Washington Arlington Airport and Washington Herndon Airport. Then we don't have to get into all these popularity contests like what happened with the Atlanta airport in 2003.
I just use "DCA" and "Far-Away-Shithole-For-International-Flights." We can add the Dulles "mobile lounges" to the list of stuff that 1960s starchitects thought were awesome but turned into the bane of future generations. Right up there with brutalism.
Yes, those are weird and not very functional. I feel like I've got a layover on Tatooine when I'm at Dulles. I honestly thought that the atmosphere in N VA was at least somewhat breathable.
In general, though, don't write off 20th century modern architecture so quickly. I mean yes it's megalomaniacal and unfunctional, but it's still as much a part of history as the Victorian Era and Classical Rome. In the 60s here they tore down a vintage southern neoclassical courthouse and built a modernist monstrosity back in its place. Now everybody wishes it would get torn down. They don't see that that would be repeating the same old mistake of tearing down history before they can recognize it as historic. The building is classic 1960s architecture, and it's very representative of the space race era that really built the town.
