Aeroporto internazionale di Pechino-Daxing

Inaugurated in September 2019, Beijing Daxing International Airport (BDIA) is currently the largest air terminal in the world with its 47 square kilometres. Situated in Daxing district in the southern periphery of the Chinese capital, in the midst of fields and food industries, it is the city’s second airport. The first terminal, Beijing Capital, reached full capacity in 2012. BDIA was constructed to relieve this pressure and transform the southern part of Beijing into a leading integrated international transport hub. One of Zaha Hadid’s last projects prior to her death in 2016, the airport establishes a new standard for airline transport services and represents a catalyst for the economic development of Tianjin and Hebei province. Designed to handle approximately 45 million passengers per year, in reality the airport will witness the transit of 72 million passengers by 2025 with a further expansion to handle up to 100 million passengers and 4 million tonnes of goods per year. The terminal is supported by an 80,000 sqm multimodal ground transport hub providing direct connections to the centre of Beijing via local and national rail lines, including high speed rail. The architecture of BDIA is based on a radial structure, articulated in 6 wings, or piers, extending out from a central multi-level nucleus that intuitively guides passengers toward departure, arrival or transfer areas. This concept makes circulation an ordering element of architecture that transforms the logistic spaces of the airport into an urban organism in which the city, or better yet, the movement of passengers and goods, flow inward, while the project flows outward to expose latent itineraries in the surrounding context. The composition of BDIA employs a radical concept that organises spaces based on opposing principles: solid/void, heavy/light, opaque/transparent, open/closed, etc. The layout of the airport generates a sequence of dynamic and non-Euclidian geometries whose lines become concrete experiences independently from the physical nature of materials. As in other works by Zaha Hadid, a particular aspect is represented by the passage from digital and parametric design to techniques of construction and the organisation of the building site. In this sense, the collaboration between engineering and architecture made possible to adopt a highly integrated approach. More than defining an artificial landscape, this project by ZHA affirms the primacy of mobility; it represents a device of movement that manipulates spatial hierarchies and captures fields of forces to translate them into landscapes with a stratified topography.