In Beijing, An Air Terminal Of Olympic Size

BEIJING — Beijing airport’s new Terminal 3 is twice the size of the Pentagon.

Adorned with the colors of imperial China and a roof that evokes the scales of a dragon, the massive glass- and steel- sheathed structure, designed by renowned British architect Norman Foster, cost $3.8 billion and can handle more than 50 million passengers a year.

The developers call it the “most advanced airport building in the world,” and say it was completed in less than four years, a timetable some believed impossible.

It opened in late February with little fanfare, but also without the kind of glitches that plagued Heathrow’s new $8.7 billion terminal, which took six years to complete.

This is the image China would like to project as it hosts the Olympic Games this summer — a confident rising power constructing dazzling monuments exemplifying its rapid progress and its audacious ambition. While much of the world has focused on protests trailing the Olympic torch or criticism of Beijing’s human rights record, workers here have been putting the finishing touches on one of the biggest building programs the world has ever seen.

For instance, Beijing’s main Olympic stadium, nicknamed the Bird’s Nest, is already widely admired for its striking appearance and its use of an unusual steel mesh exterior. The nearby National Aquatics Center, known as the Water Cube, is a translucent blue bubble that glows in the dark.

And east of the main Olympic arenas, construction is winding down on the new headquarters of the country’s main state television network, China Central Television, or CCTV.

The $700 million building, designed by Rem Koolhaas, consists of two leaning, L-shaped towers that rise 767 feet and may be the world’s largest and most expensive media headquarters.

New York has the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building and the Guggenheim Museum, Paris has the Louvre and the Pompidou Center; now Beijing is determined to build its own architectural icons.

“Beijing is a huge experimental site right now,” says Zhu Wenyi, dean of the school of architecture at Tsinghua University. “This modern architecture is the identity of modern China.”

But sometimes the sheer scale of the buildings overwhelms everything else. Thirty years after economic reforms began, this country has built a series of super-structures that almost seem intended more for the Guinness Book of World Records than cityscapes.

China is home, for instance, to the world’s largest shopping mall (the seven million square foot South China Mall); the longest bridge (a span that stretches 36 kilometers (about 22 miles) over part of the East China Sea); the largest hydroelectric dam (the massive Three Gorges project); and the highest railway (an engineering marvel that crosses the Tibetan permafrost 16,000 feet above sea level, the so-called “roof of the world”).

Late last year, Beijing opened what may be the world’s largest performance hall, the National Center for the Performing Arts, a $400 million concert hall, opera house and theater facility twice as big as the Kennedy Center in Washington. Nicknamed The Egg, the Chinese center’s titanium dome rises above a wide reflecting pool of water.

For decades, the ruling Communist Party used huge building programs to lure foreign investment and to create millions of jobs. But this new wave is different.

“This is just the start,” said Ma Yansong, a 32-year-old architect who studied in the United States and runs a practice here. “The last 10 years we’ve had landmark buildings in Beijing and Shanghai. But now, the private developers are coming in, and second-tier cities want to develop.”

In recent weeks, many Chinese have complained about what they say is Western media distortions about China and its role in Tibet, where riots broke out last month.

Indeed, behind the increasingly nationalistic counter-protests is a fear that the Chinese’s Olympic moment is being overshadowed by critics and that the country’s remarkable achievements are being ignored.

Many Chinese believe that will change on August 8, 2008 — an auspicious date by traditional reckoning because 8 is a lucky number — as the world focuses on the Olympics and China’s undeniable accomplishments.

In Beijing, officials have used the Olympics to justify razing old neighborhoods and relocating tens of thousands of poor residents, with hopes of remaking the city into a modern capital of new highways, subway lines and gleaming skyscrapers.

Similarly, city officials in Shanghai have relocated huge factories and thousands of residents along the famed Huangpu Riverfront to prepare a two-square mile site for the 2010 World Expo, Shanghai’s own coming out.

With China rapidly urbanizing, there are now dozens of other big cities developing master plans and commissioning new skyscrapers, expressways and whole shopping districts.

In Macao, one of China’s special administrative zones, the Las Vegas-based Sands Corporation built a 10.5 million square foot casino, hotel and convention center, which opened last summer to huge crowds.

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