The new airport terminal building at Madrid's Barajas Airport ― together with the associated satellite, rail and road connections, and car parks for 9,000 ― is probably Europe's largest current construction project. The terminal and satellite totalling 700,000m~2 (the existing terminal complex is about 200,000m~2) is larger even than Foster's Chek Lap Kok airport in Hong Kong. It is designed to handle 35 million extra passengers annually. Including the car parks and rail station, more than one million square metres of space are under construction. Scheduled for completion a year and a half from now, this is the first major new airport development of the 21st century. But it is something more than architecture on the grand scale; it is also a landmark project for Richard Rogers Partnership (RRP), a marriage of architecture and engineering, evoking the spirit of Beaubourg, the building that launched Richard Rogers' global career a quarter of a century ago.
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