Beijing Daxing Airport Opens Under Zaha Hadid’s Starfish Roof

Beijing Daxing International Airport opened on 25 September 2019, and the first commercial flights left the next day. It is the second international airport of Beijing, built to relieve Capital Airport, which had reached its limit. It lies 46 kilometres south of the city centre, on the boundary with Hebei province.

The terminal

The terminal was designed by Zaha Hadid Architects with the French airport planners ADPI. Zaha Hadid died in 2016, and it was among the last major projects on which she worked. The building covers 700,000 square metres under one roof and is the largest single-building airport terminal in the world.

From the air it looks like a starfish. Five aircraft piers radiate from a central courtyard, where check-in, security and baggage reclaim are stacked on several levels. The purpose of the shape is to shorten distances: the farthest of the 79 gates is less than eight minutes’ walk from the centre.

The vaulted roof comes down to the floor to carry the structure and bring daylight into the middle of the building, and long strips of glazing run along the piers.

The numbers

The airport has four runways. It was designed for 45 million passengers a year at first, rising to 72 million by 2025, with room to grow to 100 million. The cost, with roads and railways, was about 450 billion yuan. China Southern, China Eastern and China United moved their Beijing operations to Daxing, with a number of foreign airlines. Air China and most of its Star Alliance partners stayed at Capital Airport.

For travellers

Beijing now has two large airports on opposite sides of the city, and it matters which one a ticket names. Daxing is further out than Capital, but the rail links are fast. The Daxing Airport Express, a driverless metro line that runs at 160 kilometres an hour, reaches Caoqiao, on the southern edge of the centre, in about twenty minutes, and connects there with the city metro. A high-speed train runs from Beijing West station in 28 minutes. A taxi to the central hotel districts takes an hour or more.

The location suits hotels in the south of the old city, such as Mandarin Oriental Qianmen, at the southern end of the Central Axis. Other new airports in Asia have also been conceived as works of architecture, among them Techo in Phnom Penh by Foster + Partners, and the timber terminal that Bhutan is building at Gelephu.