world’s largest airport passenger terminal in Beijing
The Beijing New Airport Terminal Building will be located on the opposite side of the city from Beijing’s existing Capital Airport, which was completed in 2008 by Foster + Partners but is already exceeding its planned capacity – despite being one of the biggest airports in the world. Zaha Hadid is working with airport specialist ADPI on plans for a major new terminal in Daxing, Beijing, that will accommodate 45 million passengers per year.
According to the architects, the terminal will have a flexible layout that will allow it to be adapted into different configurations. It will also be connected to local and national rail services, including the Gao Tie high-speed rail. the Daxing airport will be “a key hub within Beijing’s growing transport network and a catalyst for the region’s economic development, including the city of Tianjin and Hebei Province”.
Consultants Buro Happold, Mott Macdonald and EC Harris will work alongside the design team to deliver the project.
Work on the building began less than five years ago. The £50bn project opened to much fanfare on 25 September 2019, with an inauguration ceremony attended by President Xi Jinping.
The 700,000sqm airport, designed by architect Zaha Hadid before she died in 2016, is the Chinese capital’s second mega-airport, following in the footsteps of Beijing Capital International Airport.
Plans are already afoot to expand this to eight runways, with capacity for 100 million passengers annually, by 2040, reports The Guardian.
The airport is located 30 miles south of downtown Beijing, meaning rail and road links also had to be constructed to connect it to the city proper.
The first commercial flight from the airport took off this afternoon – the China Southern Airlines aircraft was bound for Guangdong in the south.
The vast, star-shaped airport is about 30 miles south of downtown Beijing. It has four runways, with plans for as many as three more.
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Carriers including British Airways and state-owned China Southern, the country’s biggest airline by passengers, plan to move to Daxing from Beijing Capital International Airport.
