The Independent looks inside Beijing’s new airport, touted as the world’s largest building:
The newly wealthy citizens of a confident, powerful China will be treated to what is hailed as the world’s biggest building. Designed by Lord Foster and built by the British-based global engineer Arup, the terminal caters for a rapidly expanding middle-class in China, keen to exercise their new financial muscle by taking to the skies. The project was delivered in four years, less time than it took to start even drawing up the plans for Heathrow’s Terminal 5.
Beijing’s reconstruction, and transformation, from a 14th-century capital centred around a cosmological axis and the Forbidden City, has been the most dramatic building project the world has seen in peacetime.
And now it has its airport. It is stunning. A golden roof slopes gently above the glass and steel main structure, and the skylights dotting the top of the building are designed to let natural light into the terminal, which is just under two miles long. They look like the raised scales on a mythical dragon’s back.
