Beijing Daxing International Airport. Un progetto di Zaha Hadid Architects per l’hub aeroportuale più grande del mondo

Beijing’s Daxing International Airport, operational since September 2019 in time for celebrating 70 years since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, is just the latest in a long series and, for the moment, the world’s largest air terminal (and it will certainly be surpassed in the near future by many other stopovers). Perhaps not even Spielberg—who with the film The Terminal had staged the sense of the term non-place and the eXtra Large spatialities—would have imagined the human swarm and the related numbers that the increasingly pervasive globalization would have imposed on today’s infrastructures, forcing us to review the concept of complexity and its declination in the relationship with the physical space of architecture. The construction of this work, great in size, iconicity and relative symbolic value for contemporary China, is part of the need for an ambitious country to tell the world about its technical skills and its ability to program and manage infrastructures