The latest issue of "Transforming Dublin Airport" has just landed on my desk, courtesy of the airport authority's propaganda department. It contains impressive pictures of a gleaming new Terminal 2, now under construction, and an even more gleaming Pier D, already built. And on the subject of the latter structure, it quotes approvingly one newspaper's verdict: "Space-age", writes Frank McNally
I'm sure this was intended as a compliment. But is it one, really? Because for something that's supposed to mean "futuristic", the term "space-age" has a curiously dated feel about it these days.
As long ago as the 1990s, I recall it being used about the new Cusack Stand in Croke Park, and even then there was an ironic twist to the phrase. It was the sort of thing you said as a self-deprecating joke when you sat down in your seat and looked around the stadium, pretending you were just up from the country and easily impressed.
The reality is that, although officially ongoing, the Space Age ended decades ago. The era lasted only about 15 years, spanning roughly the career of the Beatles and the first two Wings albums. It probably began with the launch of Sputnik One in 1957 and peaked with the early moon landings.
But I suspect public optimism about the whole space project started waning in the middle of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), just after Hal the computer had a nervous breakdown and murdered the crew.
At any rate, now that we've passed the actual year 2001, with still no sign of the sort of space travel portrayed in that film (nor of the flying cars that 1960s sci-fi writers expected to be standard by the end of the millennium), Space-Age sounds like just another 20th-century architectural style, somewhere between art deco and brutalism.
Perhaps it was the style that - as somebody once said of La Défence in Paris - goes straight from being futuristic to passé, without ever seeming to belong to the present.
In this sense, Liberty Hall is probably Ireland's classic Space-Age building, though I detect a sneaking regard for it now in certain quarters. Architectural fashions are cyclical, after all. A year after they finally knock it, it will probably be acclaimed as a lost masterpiece.
THE REAL CHALLENGE facing the Dublin Airport Authority, I believe, is to accept that the Space Age is over and that we now live in the No-Space Age, especially when we travel by air. Everywhere is more crowded than it used to be. But thanks to Michael O'Leary - the No-Space Age version of Yuri Gagarin - the problem is particularly acute in airports.
The No-Space Age flying experience means that when you try to get a seat on the next flight anywhere now, you can't - because, unlike 20 years ago, the plane is full. It also means that when you do get on board a flight, you have to squeeze yourself into an area that, in the 1960s, would have constituted human rights abuse.
Outside business class, the concept of "personal space" does not exist on modern aeroplanes.
If you're taller than 5ft 10ins, you usually have to stow your knees away in the back of the passenger in front. And God forbid that you and the adults either side of you should order meals at the same time, or you'll need the skills of a synchronised swimming team to eat them without suffering an injury.
On the plus side, you will at least have been mentally prepared for the flight by the airport security checks, which are increasingly designed to deprive you both of potentially dangerous objects and of any dignity you're trying to smuggle on board.
Inconvenient as it may be, having to take your shoes and belt off while displaying all the liquids and pastes on which your life depends so that everyone else can gawk at them softens you up for the actual journey.
I think the DAA knows all this very well, in fact, because in most of the pictures featured in the booklet, the new Dublin Airport appears to be comfortingly deserted. This is a standard ploy in estate agents' brochures, with their artists' impressions of finished estates, in which - never mind the houses - each person pictured occupies a half-acre site.
But it's not just the computer-generated image of the airport's Terminal 2 that looks under-populated. In an actual photograph of Pier D, the humans are so few and so far away as to be only a rumour. Indeed, when the accompanying text notes that the lack of columns within the structure "adds greatly to the feeling of space", I'm not sure whether it's the inner or outer kind the writer means.
ON AN UNRELATED note - or maybe not - concerned reader George Colton has written to me again, this time about a letter he received recently from Eircom. It was about his "talk-time broadband bundle", which was alarming enough. But the really worrying thing was the attached pre-paid envelope, addressed to something called the "Customer Suppressions Department".
I'm sure this is not as sinister as it sounds. In fact, a Google search of the term suggests that Eircom is not alone in doing whatever kind of suppressing this involves.
The question is: does the DAA have a Customer Suppressions Department too? And is that how they got those pictures of an empty airport?