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Afternoon sunshine at the new terminal Bookmark and Share

7:46 PM Mon, Jan 21, 2008 |

This is the spectacular new Terminal 3 at Beijing's airport.
It is really an amazing building, or set of three buildings. It is designed to represent a dragon chasing a pearl, which may sound odd for an airport as you're reading my description in black-on-white words, but it is a design that really seems to work.


You can't see the dragon from inside the romantically named "Terminal 3" of course, but you can feel it. It is all rounded space, enormous sweeps of windows, jagged edges that compliment the soft contours, oblique lighting from huge triangular skylights above the linear drop-ceiling and wonderful curving lines of towering red columns. Quite a place, inside and out.
It will more than double the airport's jet-landing capacity. They'll start landing and taking off for real at the end of February.
This picture was taken at about 1:30 in the afternoon. That's as much as we saw of the sun all day.




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