things not well done | t3 ceiling ::
:: generally speaking, I quite like the Beijing airport, especially the newish 3rd terminal – it’s really nice. Yesterday, while waiting for my 3-hour-delayed flight back to Shanghai, I decided to sprawl out across the benches and get some rest. While looking up at the ceiling, I noticed something not so “well done,” and it really bothered me. See below for two (of many that I counted) out-of-place ceiling boards. The ceiling design, as a whole, is well done, but these tiny (and easily fixable) imperfections just ruined it for me. // AjS
February 25th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
I’ll tell you what else is not well done there: The pathway from the departure area to the nearly completely hidden and inaccessible airline ticketing offices, secreted away on the “Being John Malkovich” style secret floor that only certain elevators stop at and only certain doors open into. As I discovered when I missed a flight recently.
February 25th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
Boyce,
The roof seems to be a particularly difficult issue when it comes to construction in Beijing like, say, Sanlitun Village, where the roof leaks (or at least leaked) in Blue Frog, Union, and Element Fresh (it delayed the opening of the latter, which had planned to be up and running by the Olympics).
Cheers, Boyce
February 26th, 2009 at 6:03 pm
At least you don’t see that unless you look straight up. I’d take that over the awful, awful, awful typography at Pudong, which uses what seems to be a rip-off of Arial — not even a rip-off of Helvetica! — in which the character “1″ has been replaced by “I”. There are a lot of 1s in the airport, and I die a little bit inside every time I see one.