Shenzhen is one of the fastest growing cities in the world: it was founded in the late 1970s on the site of fishing villages as a response from communist China to located very close to Hong Kong, and over the past 30 years has grown into a multimillion-dollar metropolis, the most important economic center of the PRC. Such a speed of development requires an appropriate transport system, and a measure for its modernization was the construction of a new Terminal 3 at Shenzhen Bao'an International Airport.
The terminal with a total area of 500 thousand m2 has a length of 1.5 km and a span of up to 80 m. The building has 63 boarding gates with boarding bridges and 15 ordinary ones. With its commissioning, the airport's capacity increased by 58% - up to 45 million passengers per year. The project budget was 734 million euros.
The ceilings are composed of glass and metal hexagonal elements - "honeycomb" that define the image of the building. The airport is cruciform in plan, and its main space, the waiting room, is located in its center. Natural lighting on all three floors (arrivals, departures, service area) is provided by the atriums that unite them.
Notable elements of the interior include white "trees" - ventilation system hoods, as well as polished steel check-in counters, boarding gates and passport control lines. The honeycomb motif is used at all levels - from the volume of retail outlets to the pattern of walls and suspended ceilings.
Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas won the international competition for the Terminal 3 design in 2008, with the detailed design and implementation of the project taking less than three years. Also, these architects are developing the next two stages of the expansion of Shenzhen Bao'an Airport: in 2025 they will add a satellite terminal with railway stations to T3, and in 2035 they will expand both the T3 itself and the "satellite". Considering the long term for the implementation of this plan, the architects included the possibility of transformation in the project, since it is difficult to predict the needs of air transport in 20 years.
