Storms, heat, and a busy holiday weekend all combined into a worst-case-scenario for many air travelers in the U.S. earlier this month. People traveling for the Fourth of July holiday faced thousands of flight delays and cancellations, and many ended up spending much of their extended weekend inside the walls of an airport terminal.
What they likely weren’t doing was sleeping. Despite delays that often stretch hours and cancellations that leave travelers waiting overnight for their next flights, airports are actively designed so that people cannot sleep in them. Rows of chairs fill their gate lounges, but almost all are outfitted with immovable armrests that prevent a body going horizontal. Most of them lack even a reclining aspect to let a person lay back. This defensive architecture, like buildings or public seating with features that prevent the unhoused from sleeping, makes an unpleasant day of delayed travel that much worse.
According to the airport designers we spoke with for this story, there’s a mundane rationale behind this this seemingly inhumane design choice—it’s a simple matter of real estate.
The lease
“The fundamental reason why you can’t sleep in airport gate lounges, or that it’s hard to, is they’re trying to fit as many people in that room as comfortably as they can without increasing the lease area paid by the airline,” says Matt Needham, director of aviation and transportation at the global architecture firm HOK. “It’s a cost efficiency.”
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