Beijing Airport

The new Terminal 3 at the airport in Beijing is twice the size of the Pentagon.

Adorned in the colors of imperial China, with a roof that evokes the scales of a dragon, the massive glass- and steel-sheathed structure, designed by the 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 Heathrow's new $8.7 billion terminal near London, which took six years to complete.

This is the image China would like to project as it plays host to the Olympic Games this summer - a confident rising power constructing dazzling new monuments that exemplify its rapid progress and its audacious ambition.

While much of the world has focused on protests trailing the Olympic torch relay, Beijing's poor human rights record, its pollution, product safety and child labor scandals and a host of other problems, workers here have been putting the finishing touches on one of the biggest building programs the world has ever seen.

Beijing hopes to overcome these negatives, and the bleak side of its roaring economy, by emphasizing its ability to upgrade and modernize, at least when it comes to buildings and infrastructure projects.

For instance, Beijing's main Olympic stadium, nicknamed the Bird's Nest, is already widely admired for its striking appearance and its use of an unusual steel mesh exterior. The nearby National Aquatics Center, known as the Water Cube, is a translucent blue bubble that glows in the dark.

And east of the main Olympic arenas, construction is winding down on the new headquarters of the country's main state television network, China Central Television.

The $700 million building, designed by Rem Koolhaas, consists of two leaning, L-shaped towers that rise 234 meters, or 768 feet, and may be the world's largest and most expensive media headquarters.

New York has the Empire State Building and the Guggenheim, Paris has the Louvre and the Pompidou Center, now Beijing is determined to build its own architectural icons.

"Beijing is a huge experimental site right now," said Zhu Wenyi, dean of the school of architecture at Tsinghua University. "This modern architecture is the identity of modern China."

Thirty years after economic reforms began, this country has built a series of superstructures that almost seem intended more for the Guinness Book of World Records than cityscapes.

China is home, for instance, to the world's largest shopping mall (the 650,000-square-meter, or seven-million-square-foot, South China Mall); the longest sea-crossing bridge (stretching 36 kilometers, or 22 miles, over part of the East China Sea); the largest hydroelectric dam (the massive Three Gorges project); and the highest railroad (an engineering marvel that crosses the Tibetan permafrost almost 5,000 meters above sea level).

Late last year, Beijing opened what may be the world's largest concert hall, the National Center for the Performing Arts, a $400 million opera house and theater facility twice as big as the Kennedy Center in Washington. Nicknamed The Egg, its titanium dome rises above a wide pool of water.

For decades, the ruling Communist Party used huge building programs to lure foreign investment and to create millions of jobs. But this new wave is different.

"This is just the start," said Ma Yansong, a 32-year-old architect who studied in the United States and runs a practice here. "The last 10 years we've had landmark buildings in Beijing and Shanghai. But now the private developers are coming in, and second tier cities want to develop."

In recent weeks, many Chinese have complained about what they say are Western media distortions about China and its role in Tibet, where riots broke out in March.

Behind the increasingly nationalistic counterprotests is a fear that China's Olympic moment is being overshadowed by critics and that the country's remarkable achievements are being ignored.

Many Chinese believe that will change on Aug. 8, 2008 - an auspicious date by traditional reckoning because eight is a lucky number - as the world focuses on the Olympics and China's undeniable accomplishments.

In Beijing, officials have used the Olympics to justify razing old neighborhoods and relocating tens of thousands of poor residents with hopes of remaking the city into a modern capital of new highways, subway lines and gleaming skyscrapers.

Similarly, city officials in Shanghai have relocated huge factories and thousands of residents along the famed Huangpu Riverfront to prepare for the 2010 World Expo, Shanghai's own coming out.

With China rapidly urbanizing, there are now dozens of other big cities developing master plans and commissioning new skyscrapers, expressways and whole shopping districts.

In Macao, Sands Corp. of Las Vegas built a 975,000-square-meter casino, hotel and convention center, which opened last summer to huge crowds.

Not everyone, however, is pleased with the development transforming China's cities. Old neighborhoods and important historical buildings are being demolished. Expressways and skyscrapers have erased cultural signposts. Even some leading Chinese architects and urban planners are crying foul.

Others complain that too many foreign architects are being showcased, at the expense of China's homegrown talent, that Chinese elements are being lost - like Beijing's old courtyard style homes - and that aggressive development is littering the landscape with modern monstrosities.

"I'm completely against this big architecture. It's a total waste," said Yin Zhi, president of the urban planning and design institute at Tsinghua University in Beijing. "The government wants to grab the Olympic opportunity to remake Beijing, spending so much money on these stupid projects. Why not use the budget to improve Beijing's traffic system? Why not improve the quality of people's lives?"

Yin added: "China as a developing country is not supposed to spend so much on these eye-catching projects. It shows in some ways that China lacks confidence." But Beijing seems eager to show the world it can bring world-class architects to China.

Local developers are rushing to capitalize on this moment of hyper transformation. A rising middle class and the emergence of a car culture in China is creating opportunities to build new cities and suburbs, and many cities want to prove they are fast-developing, hoping to lure even more investment.

With the economy booming, air travel has also skyrocketed, which has demanded new airports. Indeed, even after a massive building boom over the past decade, the government says there are plans to build another 97 new airports by 2020.

Here in Beijing, Terminal 3 was fast-tracked to meet the surge in air travel into the capital, and to create a dazzling new gateway to the city in time for the Olympics.

Foster Partners, the British architectural firm, only won the design competition in late 2003. The firm quickly set up an office here and in March 2004 began work on a 1.3 million-square-meter facility that would eventually dwarf all five of Heathrow's terminals combined.

The developers wanted to incorporate Chinese characteristics, so they sought the advice of a Feng Shui master. They selected red and gold as the dominant colors, in order to match those of old palaces and the Forbidden City.

Then they raced the clock.

"In November 2003, we were awarded the contract," said Mouzhan Majidi, the lead architect on the project. "Within a week, we had to have a Foster office in Beijing."

Siemens, the German company, built a sophisticated baggage handling system that can sort and transport 19,200 pieces of luggage an hour through the three-kilometer long building.

The building opened ahead of schedule, largely because Beijing had turned the site into a 24-hour-a-day operation, with tens of thousands of workers living on the airport grounds; the kind of operation that can only be found in China.

Beijing literally supplied an army of workers.

"When I think back to our site visits with Norman, it was an incredible scene to see 50,000 people working on a building," said Majidi, who worked closely with Norman Foster, the Pritzker prize-winning architect. "It evoked what it might have been like to build the pyramids."

Yet, astoundingly, it may not be big enough. In January, Beijing's civil aviation authority announced that yet another international airport was needed in the city. Construction is expected to begin soon.