Beijing Airport

Such is the uncompromising, even alienating modernity of much of the new building in Beijing that the Chinese have been giving their new structures zoomorphic nicknames. Herzog + De Meuron’s Olympic Stadium has long been known as the Bird’s Nest, so it was only a matter of time before Paul Andreu’s ovoid National Centre for the Performing Arts became the Bird’s Egg and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture/Rem Koolhaas’s teetering bifurcated China Central Television Tower the Bird’s Legs. So no prizes for guessing that Norman Foster’s sinuous glass-and-steel Terminal 3 building at Beijing Capital International Airport is the Dragon, a recumbent one that lies between the existing eastern runway and a proposed third one. As China’s CCTV network put it: “The Dragon’s head, body and tail are the main buildings of the terminal,” while “the ball that the Dragon is playing with is the distributing centre, including parking areas and subway terminal,” from which passengers will be whisked to the city in just 16 minutes.

Certainly Foster + Partners’ design would seem to conform to the dictionary definition of a dragon: “a fabulous winged scaly-armoured monster, often a guardian of treasure.” (Let’s just hope it doesn’t breathe fire or wreak destruction, though the airport authorities have admitted that 10,000 people saw their homes demolished when the site was cleared.) For a start, its dimensions are tremendous. In surpassing the Aalsmeer Flower Auction house in the Netherlands, it is now the world’s largest building, 3.25km nose to tail, its floor space an incredible 1.3m square metres, an area that exceeds the footprints of all five terminals at London’s Heathrow combined. No wonder it involved a workforce of 50,000, and incorporates 500,000 tonnes of steel, 1.8m cubic metres of concrete and 1,150km of cabling.

But its monstrous qualities are about more than scale. It has scales too: triangular linear skylights angle out of its soaring aerodynamic roof to face south-east in order, says a spokesman for Foster, “to maximise heat gain from the early morning sun,” as well as natural light. While the trusses that support the glazing gradually alter in colour through a 16-tone palette of reds – the colour of good fortune – in the northernmost part of the building when you enter, through oranges to yellows – the colour of China’s imperial dynasties.

For all its innovation, there are many traditional details intended to recall elements of Beijing’s mostly 15th-century Forbidden City: the terminal’s facade is punctuated by scarlet columns, “evocative of traditional Chinese temples”; the roof is golden; and inside there are decorative motifs to recall the Nine-Dragon Screen on the eastern edge of the palace (nine, incidentally, was the imperial number, and dragons were the emperor’s symbol). There’s also a bamboo-filled indoor garden near the T3B departure area for international flights.

But ultimately this is a terminal that looks to the future. Indeed, its architects claim it is already “the world’s most advanced airport building not only technologically, but also in terms of passenger experience, operational efficiency and sustainability”. Like Foster’s last major airport project, Chek Lap Kok in Hong Kong, not to mention the other pre-eminent British architect, Richard Rogers’ Terminal 5 at Heathrow, which opened almost simultaneously, it has a transparency and is open to views on all sides. Both terminals also have single swooping roof canopies making them, in effect, huge “loose-fit” sheds, which gives them an innate “flexibility to cope with the unpredictable nature of the aviation industry”. If security requirements change, or the airport wants to reconfigure the retail offering, the space can be altered without major construction work.

Built at a cost of €2.2bn (CNY25bn) in less than four years, Terminal 3 aims to accommodate 64 million passengers a year by 2015, says Dong Zhiyi, deputy general manager of the Capital Airport Holding Company, hence the 330 check-in desks and a baggage-handling system by Siemens that can cope with 20,000 bags an hour, shifting them at a speed of 10m a second, twice that of the conveyor belts at Heathrow. Which is in itself almost enough of a reason to choose one of the airlines assigned to it – for the moment only those airlines that are members of Oneworld and Star Alliance networks.