Friends offering insider tips to first-timers in Beijing will always say, get the latest map the moment you get in. The city changes so rapidly, maps quickly get outdated. The story of how spectacularly the 2008 Olympics has changed the Beijing skyline has been told many times over. But driving out of Norman Foster’s Terminal 3, so many cranes can be seen stilled temporarily by the extreme measures undertaken to cut pollution and smog that you know Beijing is not yet done with re-imagining itself.

Foster’s terminal, speckled with the red and yellow of the imperial quarters, demands that the visitor linger a while. In this Olympics of superlatives, the terminal is audacious for more than its diminishment by size of the Pentagon and the futuristic readiness to handle more than 50 million passengers a year. On an afternoon when the Beijing sun comes out bright, walking though the airport (to which the baggage tags still say PEK, for the city’s old name, Peking) is surreal. In its play of materials and lavish use of glass, the idea of being enclosed has been redefined. But Terminal 3, today, is itself a city waiting to be inhabited.

Today it’s too new. It is also cheerily awash with the volunteers, waving you through the formalities and so averting the delays that force the arrivals to linger and absorb the embarkation point’s peculiarities. The volunteers breeze you away with directions to the next counter, or the shuttle to baggage check (the layout and transport within of Terminal 3 have the familiar texture of old sci-fi depictions of self-contained mini-cities) and into the media buses waiting to take away the thousands of journalists to their hotels and Games venues, the road out of the airport having a lane cleared for them.

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