A little over a decade after Beijing Capital Airport constructed a new terminal by Foster + Partners to accommodate an additional 50 million passengers a year, the capital city is unveiling a new airport just 30 miles to the south. The 7.5 million-square-foot Beijing Daxing International Airport, designed by the team of ADP Ingénierie (ADPi), Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA), and the Beijing Institute of Architecture and Design (BIAD), will include four runways (compared to three at the Capital) and serve 45 million passengers yearly when it opens this fall; by 2025, that capacity is expected to reach an annual 72 million. Built on a greenfield site in a rural area in Hebei province, the starfish-shaped terminal, with its glowing standing-seam aluminum roof and cluster of bulbous skylights, appears as an alien spacecraft—or, for some Chinese, as the auspicious mythological phoenix—when viewed from above.