Beijing's New Airport Design by Norman Foster

Beijing's new airport is rising from the dry plains east of the city so fast that, in just four years, China will have designed, built and opened a structure larger than all the terminals at Heathrow combined.

That's rather less time than the lawyers spent arguing about Heathrow's Terminal 5.

'It's the world's largest and most advanced airport building,' says the project's architect, Norman Foster.

With airports at Stansted and Hong Kong already under his belt, he should know better than anyone.

But it still looks more like a medieval battlefield conceived on the scale of a Japanese epic, rather than the sleek glass-and-steel bubble shown in Foster's glittering computer renderings.

Swarming warrior armies cluster around giant cranes, more than 100 of them, ranged like ancient siege engines across a frontline almost two miles long.

The dust swirling across the landscape makes it impossible to count more than a few of them before they disappear into the acrid haze.

Touring the site in a Chinese-made Buick, it's hard as a spectator to grasp exactly what is going on.

Eventually, all the furious activity crystallises into a pattern that begins to make some kind of sense.

The banners flying from makeshift flagpoles sunk into the mud everywhere carry the names of individual work gangs, each with their own