Technology: A tube? No, an event landscape! – Terminal 3, Shenzhen Bao’an International Airport
- Frank Kaltenbach
A “manta ray emerging from the depths of the sea, transformed into a bird and ascending into the sky” – this is how Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas describe their design for the new Terminal 3, realized in collaboration with Knippers Helbig Advanced Engineering and the Beijing Institute for Architectural Design (BIAD). This expansion project allows the airport to handle 40 million passengers per year and makes it the fourth largest in China behind Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. In November 2013 the first construction phase comprising 62 gates was opened: a one and a half kilometres long building with a gross floor area of 450,000 m² and a capacity to handle 24 million passengers per year - completed in less than six years following the first phase of a multi-stage process of selecting architect teams. In China, large scale projects seem to proceed much more smoothly than in Germany. What is the reason for this? Different political structures or higher competence in the field of process management?
