Certainly, reinventing the airport at Beijing came at a cost. Not only in monetary terms, the airport costing over three billion dollars to be built, but also in terms of labor, public space and policy. The entire terminal structure covers an area of more than one million square meters and about 10,000 residents had to be evacuated to make way for Terminal 3. Also, in order to allow completion of such a large structure in a record five-year period, 40,000 construction workers physically relocated to the site, `working eight-hour shifts around the clock'\cite{faster}. Only in the fertile architectural setting of modern China, could a project of this caliber have taken place. The pressing need to build a state-of-the-art airport in light of the Olympic Games, overshadowed possible issues linked to poor working conditions, environmental considerations and urban planning. In order to reinvent the airport as a `space' and rework airport design from scratch, Foster had to operate a small-scale \textit{tabula rasa}. In these terms, Beijing might be considered an experimental platform that will hopefully inspire a number of other projects that, like PEK T3, revive the nostalgic romance of air travel.