Flights of Fancy: Creativity and Inspiration

What happens when a place makes you want to pay attention?

I have long wanted to see what the TWA (Trans World Airlines) Hotel was like. I got my chance when a flight delay left me stranded at JFK for one unexpected night.

Somewhere between the curved concrete ceilings, rotary phones, destination posters and the old Connie parked outside the windows, I found myself thinking less about airplanes than history and creativity.

The TWA Hotel, built around the former Trans World Airlines Flight Center, is essentially a living museum where guests can experience what flying felt like in its golden era.

I stepped into 1962.

The height of the Jet Age, when commercial travel was transforming aviation and more Americans were taking to the skies. Air travel promised elegant lounges, attentive service and space-age glamour. TWA was one of America’s premier international airlines, competing with Pan Am for prestige.

I walked to the front desk to book a room, thinking analog still existed. Silly me. I needed to book online.

After creating an account, I began my journey back to the future.

The little things

Staircases seem to float from one level to another. Long windows frame the runways. A red carpet snakes through the white interior.

But it was the little things that made me pause.

Vintage uniforms and luggage on display. Graphic travel posters promising Las Vegas, Spain and Paris. A very pink recreation of a 1960s beauty salon, complete with hooded hair dryers. Exhibits about the advertising TWA once placed in New York City shop windows, long before an influencer could post on Instagram.

It wasn’t simply nostalgia. It was an intentional gathering and arrangement of ephemera to tell a visual story.

I felt back at school when I found a copy of an old booklet produced by TWA’s Public Relations Department about the creation of the Flight Center.

In it, I learned that architect Eero Saarinen wanted to restore some of the excitement and drama he believed ordinary terminals had stripped from travel. He wanted people to feel uplifted and full of anticipation.

A grapefruit

And then there was the grapefruit.

One story about the building’s famous curves has Saarinen becoming so absorbed in his search for the right form that he experimented with the shell of a grapefruit, pressing it down in the center to explore its shape.

A grapefruit.

I love this. Not because it gives us a tidy origin story for a famous building. The actual evolution of the design was far more complicated. I love it because it reminds me how creativity works.

We look. We play. We borrow shapes from ordinary things. We follow something that catches our attention without knowing exactly where it will lead.

In Saarinen’s case, he built a terminal. But usually it’s not on that scale.

We make something much smaller, often for someone else. A book about solving problems, a savory meal, a garden overwhelmed by vegetables to share, a f@#$ing PowerPoint, hand-decorated cookies.

Maybe the intention is the same.

The art of the possible

Walking through the TWA Hotel, I kept noticing how thoroughly a single idea can inhabit a place.

The story was in the curves and colors, typography and clothing, the music and furniture, the advertisements and artifacts. Even the everyday things had been considered.

And perhaps that’s why I kept taking pictures. This place made me feel curious, playful and nostalgic. I wanted to know where the next corner would lead, who created the art on the wall, what was on the menu.

I was also longing for an era of travel I barely remember and probably romanticize a little.

Air travel in 1962 certainly wasn’t glamorous for everyone in the way the advertisements suggest. Humans edit. We zoom in on the beautiful parts and leave plenty outside the frame.

Still, there was something here: possibility.

Saarinen wanted travelers to feel they were about to go somewhere. The building wasn’t simply meant to process people from curb to airplane. The journey itself mattered.

Sixty-plus years later, stranded overnight because my own journey hadn’t gone according to plan, I felt some of that anticipation.

Which is another thing I love about this story.

I wouldn’t have seen any of it if my flight had left on time.

Sometimes inspiration arrives because we go looking for it. Other times it arrives because our flight doesn’t.

If you want to wander a little farther

There’s much more to the story of TWA, Saarinen’s Flight Center and the building’s unlikely second life as a hotel.

The original terminal eventually became a victim, in part, of the changing world it helped usher in. Aircraft grew larger. Passenger volumes increased. The way airports worked changed. TWA eventually disappeared, and the Flight Center closed in 2001. And yet the building remained.

Today, restored and repurposed, the hotel gives the rest of us a chance to wander through 1962 for a little while and perhaps notice something we weren’t expecting to find.