Beijing's Giant Airport Terminal To Open

Arup's Goman Ho describes the daunting pace involved in completing the terminal, one of China's many building projects due before the summer Olympics

• View Slide Show

The architectural plans behind the gargantuan addition to Beijing's Capital International Airport are mind-numbingly complex. But the motivations behind what is likely the world's largest building are dead simple: Beijing is in desperate need of an expanded gateway to accommodate its rapid growth.

The Feb. 29 opening of the airport's Terminal 3 also marks the completion of the first of many mega-building projects China is scrambling to wrap up in time for this summer's Olympic Games. The project, designed by Foster + Partners and Arup, is a study in the sort of staggering statistics that the Chinese construction boom has become so adept at producing.

For instance, the $3.75 billion terminal occupies nearly 14 million square feet and will accommodate some 50 million passengers annually by 2020. And it was completed in less than four years—an astonishing feat considering the decades spent on frustrated expansion projects of much narrower scope at airports such as London's Heathrow.

Indeed, the development of Beijing's airport follows the arc of China's emergence as a major power. The airport's first terminal, its smallest, opened in 1959, the 10-year anniversary of the Chinese Communist revolution. A second terminal was completed in 1999, a symbol of the country's economic ascendancy. This final terminal, with its record-setting scope, underscores China's emergence as a financial superpower.

On the eve of the new terminal's opening, BusinessWeek.com reporter Matt Vella spoke with Goman Ho, Arup's Beijing director and the man in charge of making the immense project a reality.

The scale of this project is likely the first thing people will notice. Aside from the scope, what are the most innovative elements of the design?

Yes, the size is the first thing. You can't get around that. As you know, this is possibly the largest airport in the world. From one end to the other, it is more than 2 miles long. But the scale is also connected to every element of the design. One of the most interesting aspects of the design is the terminal's shape and the many engineering issues involved. The terminal is essentially a "Y," and that enabled us to efficiently use all the space, even over such a large area.

This project was completed in under four years. What are the challenges of working at such an accelerated pace?

The timeline was without a doubt the most challenging part of the project, much more so than the size, in fact. Basically, we only had about six months before the initial construction started. Some decisions were made very fast, for example the details of the foundation. After that, the design was developed on a rolling basis to deal with the schedule.

So how did the design accommodate the schedule?

We spent a great deal of energy trying to come up with design solutions that would be flexible for the local Chinese contractors building the site. It's a balance of engineering the airport to satisfy the design themes established by the architects while also considering how to make it easy to construct. But creating the world's largest airport with the simplest design possible is not exactly an easy task. Our solution was to create plans that could be built in multiple ways.

While foreign firms are allowed to design and engineer buildings, only local Chinese companies are allowed to do the construction. How does knowing that local contractors will eventually do the final work affect the design process?

Typically, we engineer plans to be built in a specific way—for example, what method of concrete pouring to use. In this case, however, the design allows for a high degree of flexibility for the construction, enabling the contractors to choose the methods of construction they're most experienced with. The roof is another example of this. It is one of the most structurally complicated roofs in the world given its geometry and curvature. But we designed it as a series of smaller pieces that could more easily be built and assembled by contractors.

Has this rapid pace become commonplace in Chinese building projects?

Yes. We also worked on the Beijing World Trade Center, which includes the tallest building in the city. That construction started in March, 2006, and was completed by October, 2007. The Beijing railway station, meanwhile, which is the largest railway station in Asia, will only require a year to build. In that sense, this airport is not exceptional. The idea is to create not a perfect design, but one as close to perfect as possible given the time.

Does this pace of design and construction present safety concerns? Can the design address these?

Yes. When we set out to design this project, we were particularly concerned with an incident that had occurred at the Paris airport in 2006, where a roof collapse killed a number of people. In light of this, we did what we call "robustness checking" for critical parts of the design. Essentially, we look at the points of the roof, for example, carrying the most weight and ask what might happen if half of the support was removed. This enabled us to design the structure such that if some of the pillars supporting it were to collapse, for whatever reason, the roof would deform but not collapse, hopefully injuring fewer people.

For a look at the new Beijing airport terminal, check out the BusinessWeek.com slide show.