“Travel and Leisure: Sofia Airport among the ugliest in the world – report - Sofia Echo” plus 1 more

Travel and Leisure: Sofia Airport among the ugliest in the world – report - Sofia Echo

Posted: 15 Feb 2010 05:02 AM PST

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United States magazine Travel & Leisure has published a table listing the world's ugliest and most bizarre airports, and Sofia Airport is on the list.

Travel & Leisure is based in New York City, published monthly, and it has 4.8 million readers, reportedly. It specialises in leisure travel and often features articles written by novelists, poets, artists, designers and non-travel journalists. The magazine is also renowned for its travel photography.

In one if its latest articles, a number of airports around the world are "critically analysed". Sofia Airport comes in for heavy criticism both of its old terminal, but even more so for Terminal 2, which is best described in a single word as a "misunderstanding".

"The worst offenders are ugly by choice rather than necessity: certain airports, like those in Bali and Sofia, Bulgaria, seem to have gone out of their way to acquire the uncanny placelessness that typifies the modern airport," the article says.

"Sofia's airport is a combination of a much-renovated and expanded 1937-era Terminal 1 and a new Terminal 2, which opened in 2006. The old terminal is, as you'd expect, an unpleasant amalgam of styles and additions," the article says.

"The new one should have been an improvement, yet it wound up looking like one of those impressively shiny but irredeemably wrongheaded post-Communist showplaces. You get the sense that the builders had the right kit of parts but failed to read the assembly instructions," the article says.

But the Sofia Airport is not the only one to receive such pleasant image bashing.

"The American airports we love to hate all share roughly the same problem: they were built in the 1950s or '60s and have been endlessly expanded".

"The original elegance has been destroyed by one ill-conceived remodel hack job after another. What once was a beautiful airport has become a broken architectural horror."

Regarding JFK in Queens, NY, the report brands it as a "More than dysfunctional, it's completely bananas".

Meanwhile the pride of France, Charles de Gaulle, received a thumps up along the lines of "has rendered everyone who works there sociopathic. Its staff are literally unable to empathize with the appalling experiences they inflict on passengers."

West London's Heathrow's also received its share of positive superlatives. Reportedly, its greatest virtue is that it "makes New Yorkers feel better about JFK. What does Heathrow actually look like? Hard to say - four shopping malls that have been smashed together."

Read the full article on travelandleisure.com.

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