Beijing South Railway Station

Beijing South Railway Station occupies a site in southern Beijing, rebuilt in its current form and reopened on 1 August 2008, shortly before that year's Beijing Olympics, after the demolition of an older station on the same site. Designed by the British architecture firm Farrells working with the Tianjin Architecture Design Institute, the building takes an elliptical form intended to evoke a spreading ray or trilobite, its roof punctured by rows of oval skylights that flood the concourse below with natural light. Covering roughly 320,000 square meters, larger in floor area than the Beijing National Stadium built for the same Olympics, it ranks among the largest railway stations in Asia. The station serves as the Beijing terminus for the high-speed Beijing to Tianjin intercity railway and the Beijing to Shanghai high-speed line, trains capable of running at up to 350 kilometers per hour.