World's Biggest Airport Completed

[slipperywhenwet]

So, they can't build schools that can withstand earth quakes, but they can go and make this.

I saw it at about 90% completion when I was in Beijing this spring. I guess that I should clarify that...I saw only the faint outline of it from the old airport that is only a few hundred meters away. The bulk of the structure was hidden from a very thick and well placed veil of smog. I imagine that the construction company put up this absurdly thick screen of smog around the airport to ensure that no one could get a sneak peak before the official unveiling. Unfortunately, the construction company was a little too zealous in their application of this smog screen because they accidentally covered the whole city in it.

I expect this airport to last about as long as my dorms in Beijing did, so in 6 months the walls will be cracked and seeping water, the electrical will be failing, the toilets won't be functioning, and the air conditioning will blow hot air. But! The security cameras will work perfectly.

 

[LabelKing]

This is rather true--the Shanghai Pudong Airport was opened to great but dubious acclaim a few years ago, but when I was last there, it had an air of premature decrepitude.

The design already looked tackily dated; the business class lounge was nothing but a thread-worn glorified smoking lounge with a set of bathrooms to make it "business class"alongside some canned sodas and native foods; the actual smoking lounge was this interrogation-like room downstairs by the single bathroom--imagine a huge terminal waiting area with only one set of underground bathrooms that looked cheap and shoddy to begin with.

The parking area was this awful and shabbily designed afterthought with cranky, dirty elevators and hideous lack of design, concrete walls cracked and grimy--it wasn't unlike a converted factory building from the early '80s.

However, there did seem to be a copious amount of obscure bureaucratic offices.

 

[FidelCashflow]

Crazy, but isn't Dubai working on a new airport that's supposed to be biggest in the world when its complete?

 

[Casey]

Originally Posted by Nantucket Red

Massive, sterile and depressing. I wonder how many Chinese poor were turned into landless, homeless poor in order to build this monument to capitalist ambitions.

You know, it's not so bad when there's people in it. I can't say anything about the poor though.

 

[Caomhanach]

Information smuggled out by tibetan refuges claims the chief designer was summarily executed and his family billed 17 cents for the bullet. The heroic PRC squadron that collided with our recon aircraft in international waters came in for a ceremonial landing. Of the 12 Mig 17s, 9 were damaged when they went off the runway. It seems either the engineer made the runway 5 miles wide and only 300 meters long, or the heroic PRC needs more flight time. But in the PRC, those with bullets make the rules.

 

[JetBlast]

Originally Posted by FidelCashflow

Crazy, but isn't Dubai working on a new airport that's supposed to be biggest in the world when its complete?

Yes. If it's not the biggest by the time it's done I'm sure they'll add a bunch of stuff onto it to make it the biggest.

JB

 

[w.mj]

Great pictures, zupermaus.

As to the various "how many peasants were starved" comments: fine. But surely the people who designed the airport are not the same ones starving peasants. It's possible to admire the accomplishment of a maturing country without pointing constantly (and tediously) to its blemishes.

 

[bkk]

Its a thread about an airport, nothing politically motivated. Just enjoy the airport for what it is, dammit.

 

[von Rothbart]

It looks like Hong Kong's CLK Airport on steroid, similar layout and design, especially those catwalks by the entrance. Conspicuously absent from the terminal were those red propaganda banners.

Originally Posted by LabelKing

I've visited a lot of Chinese buildings, and this airport's design and materials looks no different from any of them. That marble is especially ubiquitous.

I have no idea Norman Foster designed so many buildings in China.

 

[Caomhanach]

If it was some recycled Korea war training base with a limp windsock, greasy spoon cafe and Jimmy Stewart pilot with three days beard I would enjoy it. But this is not just a cigar anymore than Leni Riefenstahl directed Plan 9 from Outer Space. But such efforts remind me of a poem about a monument in the sand- "I am great Ozymandius. "