In Beijing: World's Largest Building

Twice the size of the Pentagon at 240 acres, Beijing's new airport terminal, takes the title of world's largest building*.

Adorned with the colors of imperial China and a roof that evokes the scales of a dragon, the massive glass- and steel-sheathed structure, designed by the renowned British architect Norman Foster, cost $3.8 billion and can handle more than 50 million passengers a year. The developers call it the “most advanced airport building in the world,” and say it was completed in less than four years, a timetable some believed impossible.

It opened in late February with little fanfare, but also without the kind of glitches that plagued the new $8.7 billion terminal at Heathrow in London, a project that took six years to complete.

This is the image China would like to project as it hosts the Olympic Games this summer — a confident rising power constructing dazzling monuments exemplifying its rapid progress and its audacious ambition.

*Contrary to the linked NY Times story, Wikipedia shows the the Aalsmeer Flower Auction in the Netherlands as slightly bigger.