Monumental Dallas-Fort Worth

How DFW made its flawed design work to become a mega hub

Millions of Americans will pack their bags and take to the skies this Thanksgiving week. Many will stop at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, the country’s second busiest and a mega hub for American Airlines.

DFW certainly is not the image of modernity when it comes to airport architecture. There are no grand moments, no “big roof,” for Thanksgiving travelers to marvel at. And those walks! But, even lacking those details, the design has proven monumental in spite of the best efforts of the teams at Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum (HOK), and Brodsky, Hopf & Adler.

“If all goes well, DFW will have the future all to itself. It is the biggest, the best-planned, the most flexible, and, by default, the most environmentally conscious airport in the world,” Texas Monthly wrote in 1973 with a stereotypical Lone Star State bravado. (DFW’s environmental bonafides were questionable)

The Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport terminals in the 1970s. (WBAP-TV/UNT Libraries Special Collections)

Master planned by Tippets-Abbett-McCarthy-Stratton in the late 1960s, dedicated in September 1973, and opened in January 1974, DFW was a testament to brooding, car-loving American culture of the time. Out were Eero Saarinen’s grand moments at JFK and Dulles, and in were squat, modular, concrete horseshoes that sought to be a non-place — a forgettable space for travelers to breeze through between car and plane.

The selling point, literally, was the short distance from curb-to-plane.

“The humanizing thing about airports is not that they are pretty but that they are easy to use — to hell with monuments!” Gyo Obata, lead architect on DFW at HOK, told Texas Monthly in 1973.

DFW’s initial four terminals were modular, pre-cast concrete structures that were designed to be easy to use and forgettable. (AIA Journal, March 1978, via U.S. Modernist)

The irony being that Obata’s non-monument quickly became a monument in its own right. As AIA Journal put it in March 1978:

“When seen from above, this master plan produces a monumental visual image that is surprisingly effective in formal and metaphorical terms. The high-speed traffic spine, with its flanking terminals that in turn are flanked by taxiways and runways, all combine to produce an ensemble that does expressive justice to the intricate patterns of movement within. The bold straight lines in this vast diagram — the central spine and outer runways — align themselves exactly north-south and accommodate the swiftest and most energetic traffic: ground vehicles arriving and departing, and the great jets taking off and landing.”

Or, as Alastair Gordon put it in Naked Airport, DFW was “somehow monumental and frighteningly mundane at the same time. Its numbingly repetitive architecture captured the essence of modern jet space.”

The master plan for DFW called for 13 horseshoe-shaped terminals. (DeGolyer BLibrary, Southern Methodist University)

Most U.S. travelers can agree with Gordon’s sentiment. As monumental as the whole DFW complex is from the air — though, as an infrequent traveler to Dallas or Fort Worth, I cannot remember the last time I looked down on the airport from up high — its original terminals are unremarkable. The gate areas, in my experience, feel somehow distant from the ramp outside despite travelers being mere steps from the plane. And the views, at least while waiting for your flight, are mostly non-existent (recent renovations by Corgan and PGAL correct this).

But DFW is a testament to the fact that design alone does not determine the success (or failure) of an airport. It has emerged a powerhouse handling 81.8 million travelers last year (and numbers were up another 8% year-to-date through September) through its original four terminals plus one addition; the U-shaped Terminal D by HNTB, HKS, and Corgan opened in 2005.

How, then, did DFW — a purposely decentralized, sprawling airport — become such a massive airline hub?

DFW and its hub airlines, particularly American but also Braniff and Delta Air Lines, to paraphrase Project Runway co-host Tim Gunn, made it work.

Inside American’s Terminal 3E at DFW in 1987. (Courtesy of American Airlines)

The original four terminals were expanded bit by bit — a few gates here, a connector there, and a satellite yonder — to accommodate the airlines’ growing hubs in the 1980s, reports indicate. The piecemeal approach was ironic given the architects’ original vision for an airport that was easily expandable with its modular, pre-cast terminal sections.

“American tried to solve the problem [of the horseshoe terminals] in 1984 by expanding into a second horseshoe concourse and connecting the two — terminals 2E and 3E [today, terminals A and C]— with a covered walkway. But with the addition, passengers arriving at Terminal 2E had to walk or ride moving sidewalks almost a mile to connect with flights leaving from Terminal 3E,” the Dallas Morning News wrote in 1988.

American planes parked at one of DFW’s terminals. (NBC 5/KXAS Photograph Collection, University of North Texas Special Collections)

One thing DFW benefitted from in its transformation into a hub was the width of the horseshoes. At 180-270 feet from curb-to-gate, according to AIA Journal in 1970, the footprint allowed for the addition of security checkpoints to the terminals and, ultimately, consolidating each terminal’s gates into a single secure area.¹

Still, with gates on just one side of each terminal — or “single loaded,” in airport planning parlance — travelers, and especially those connecting between flights, could face long, interminable walks between flights. And while the airport opened with an automated inter-terminal tram, Airtrans, the system was widely panned for its slow speeds (a maximum of 17 mph) and limited capacity (the size of a “minibus”).

The Airtrans connected DFW’s terminals from 1974 until 2005. (Noah Jeppson/Flickr)

The Airtrans was replaced in 2005 with the Skylink, a new, elevated, automated high-capacity people mover that whisks travelers efficiently between the airport’s five terminals, and all but eliminated those walks.

One fascinating proposal to “fix” DFW’s design deficiencies was a $1 billion mega-terminal for American. Designed by Corgan, the facility would have had at least 45 gates in a single, long satellite concourse connected by underground train to a new terminal on the west side of the airport’s main transportation spine — essentially, the full airside-landside separation that Atlanta proved works so well for a hub. The proposal died in the early 1990s amid the airline industry’s cyclical financial challenges.

Renderings of the proposed westside terminal for American at DFW from the late 1980s. (Corgan)

Earlier in November, DFW (finally) threw out Obata’s best laid plans for the airport when it broke ground on Terminal F. Instead of a horseshoe or a U, the facility will be a standalone satellite concourse with its own Skylink station. Connecting travelers will transit the same as they do now when transferring between, say, terminals A and C while local fliers will check in in another terminal then ride the tram to the concourse.

DFW, for all of the design deficiencies travelers and airlines found with it over the years, has become a recognizable cog in the global network of air transportation. Something of a “Stonehenge of the American prairie,” as AIA Journal put it in 1978.

And at least one good thing came from DFW’s architecture: it contributed to the return of the “grand and soaring departure hall,” with windows and views that evoke the thrill of flight, to airport architecture, Gordon wrote.

That’s certainly something we can all give thanks for this Thanksgiving.

DFW in the 1990s. (Squire Haskins Photography/University of Texas at Arlington Libraries)

1. Kansas City International Airport by Kivett and Myers (opened 1972) adopted the same horseshoe layout but, at only 65-120 feet wide from curb-to-gate, the airport struggled to adapt to increasing aviation security requirements and the terminals were eventually replaced with a conventional terminal design by SOM in 2023.