Kansai International Airport, Terminal 1

Kansai International Airport was built to relieve overcrowded Osaka air traffic without the noise disputes that had plagued the city's inland airport, and its site is the reason the terminal looks the way it does: a 4-kilometre artificial island built in Osaka Bay, chosen so flights could operate around the clock over open water. Renzo Piano won the 1988 design competition and, working with the engineers Peter Rice and Tom Barker of Ove Arup and with Nikken Sekkei, resolved the airport's central problem — moving vast volumes of conditioned air through a mile-long shed — into its form: a single toroidal roof surface, curved in section like an aircraft wing, that channels air along its underside from mechanical rooms at the terminal's centre out to its far ends, needing no ductwork at all. The 1.7-kilometre terminal, clad in 82,000 identical stainless-steel panels, opened in September 1994 and has since settled unevenly on its reclaimed ground, exactly as its engineers anticipated when they designed the structure's jacking system to correct for it.