Photo by BrianMKA

Dulles Airport is a pain in the ass to get to and has only recently become more passenger-friendly (sorry, People Movers), but there’s little denying that it’s an iconic building. So iconic, in fact, that PBS has included it among the 10 Buildings That Changed America, a show set to air next year.

Dulles—designed by Finnish architect Eero Saarinen—comes in eighth on the list, which is topped by the Virginia State Capitol in Richmond and included Boston’s Trinity Church, St. Louis’ Wainwright Building, Chicago’s Robie House, Highland Park’s Ford Plant, Minnesota’s Southdale Center, New York’s Seagram Building, Chestnut Hill’s Vanna Venturi House, and Los Angeles’ Walt Disney Concert Hall.

PBS doesn’t offer any hints as to how it drew up its list—it’s gotta keep us in suspense, after all—but the Post’s Roger K. Lewis did a good giving reasons why Dulles is important in a 2010 piece on the airport:

Designed as a jet-age threshold and gateway, the terminal is a kind of super-scaled pavilion, a place of transition between movement on land and movement through the air.

Two characteristics, in particular, make Dulles unique. It has proved functionally durable because of the terminal’s flexibility and adaptability to changing needs. Owing to the clarity of its dynamic, metaphoric geometry, its aesthetic quality also has endured, transcending shifting architectural trends.

The symbolic form of the Dulles terminal was achieved with remarkably few- yet visually potent- elements. A thin, curving, wing-like roof of cable-reinforced concrete hovers over the vast, column-free interior. Its convex underside is a smooth surface free of detail or decoration. The roof literally hangs between two parallel rows of tapered, dramatically sloping reinforced concrete columns, one row leaning toward the vehicular approach side and the other row leaning toward the airfield side.

Iconic or not, Dulles still isn’t very popular with travelers—it recently ranked as the nation’s seventh-worst airport. If Metro’s Silver Line gets to Dulles in 2018 as hoped, though, it will resolve one of the airport’s biggest drawbacks—the fact that it’s far away from the city it’s supposed to serve.

As for the Virginia State Capitol, its inclusion on the list is likely related to the fact that it houses the oldest legislature in the Western Hemisphere.