Spanish soft machine: Madrid's new airport terminal is a highly expressive cocktail of political ambition and architectural ideas.

Trudging at midnight along Gatwick's deserted corridors to board a six hour late flight to Madrid, it struck me that Gatwick epitomises all that is worst about the modern airport experience. The queuing, the disorientation, the anomie, the slog of physical distances, the lack of daylight and the endless shopping malls as a substitute for any kind of interior life. Doubtless Gatwick's designers and mood managers thought that a gaudily coloured carpet would alleviate the route march to the departure gate, but the effect was like putting lipstick on a baboon. In common with its bigger and more unmanageable sister Heathrow, Gatwick favours the Belly of the Beast model of passenger processing. Inside the Beast's Belly you could literally be anywhere. Dallas, Dacca, Dresden, Darwin; guess where you are from the carpet in the corridors. Truly, the airport is everywhere yet nowhere.

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These are familiar protestations but worth restating. Fuelled by the phenomenal growth of air travel the airport has become a necessary contemporary evil, but any building type defined by such unforgiving parameters (passenger flows, aircraft regulations, security paranoia, rampant commercialism and uninhibited bigness) would struggle to be a thing of inspiration. Yet within its short lifespan (it is only 70 years since Gatwick was a shed in a field) the airport has also suffered from a kind of hideously accelerated development. There are no archetypes to inspire or refer to, only a parade of rapidly obsolescing mutations. While most cities can muster a memorable church, city hall or museum, the memorable airport is far more elusive. A quick roll call of notables might include Piano's Kansai, Foster's Chek Lap Kok, SOM's Haj Terminal in Mecca, Saarinen at JFK, and Charles de Gaulle in Paris. And, of course, Stansted (AR May 1991), Foster's romantic vision of a sleek techno-shed in a field, still maintaining its dignity no matter how many branches of Accessorize it is obliged to accommodate.

To this woefully short list can now be added Richard Rogers' new terminal at Barajas airport in Madrid. In terms of physical size and political ambition, the new terminal is a very heavy hitter designed to increase Barajas' current annual capacity of 25 million passengers to 70 million. This will make it Europe's second busiest airport and also, crucially, one capable of accommodating the new A380 Airbus, the next generation of 800 seat super jumbos. Madrid is a natural locus of exchange between Europe and Latin America and this latest tranche of airport development, which includes two new runways, aims to strengthen the historic umbilicus between Old and New Worlds. After years of playing second fiddle to Barcelona, Madrid is feeling expansive again, with a revitalised Barajas seen as a key aspect of civic and economic image making.

Such a highly charged agenda has helped to give an almost unbelievable impetus to an exceedingly large and complex project. Construction drawings, for instance, were completed in a mere five months. Comparisons with Heathrow's Terminal 5, Rogers' other major airport project, are sadly instructive. Even at twice the size of T5 and begun eight years after it, Barajas is now complete, and its development (unlike T5's which was mired in a planning and bureaucratic morass), seems like a model of clarity and vision. From the first enlightened move of hiring a British architect (this is Rogers' first Iberian job but his project team worked closely with local firm Estudio Lamela), Barajas has been underpinned by political will, a responsive client in AENA, the Spanish airports authority, plus the room and the resources (1) to build.

Circumstances were in place for Rogers to deliver and he and project director Ivan Harbour have done so resoundingly. Barajas civilises the numbing experience of air travel, humanising the flows and processes of airport life and using them to configure a building of power and presence. Though the design was first begun in 1997 as a competition proposal, it still seems fresh and retains a spirit of dynamism and assurance. The most obvious formal move is the undulating roof, suggesting a kinship with T5, but Barajas also adopts the organisational model of Kansai (AR November 1994). As at Osaka, a wavy roofed concourse building is incised by multistorey canyons and linked to a single, immensely long pier that contains the boarding gates. This arrangement has the advantages of directional clarity (you are always moving in a linear progression either to or from your gate) and allows natural light and even views to trespass delightfully into what is usually a hermetic interior. And whether conscious or not, there is also a sense of Rogers picking up where Piano left off, taking Kansai's generative concept of a 'soft machine' that persuasively fuses the biological with the mechanical, on to the next level.

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Arriving by car (2) gives the best first view of the architectural achievement. As you swing round to the north-west of the existing Barajas complex, the new terminal appears as a vigorous wiggle in the bleached altiplano landscape, like a back-of-the-envelope sketch made flesh. The shrug of the roof seems to mimic the heave and roll of distant hills and there is a brief rainbow flash of colour. Cars dropping off passengers glide under the roof's gull wing embrace, sweeping past a vast parking structure for 9000 vehicles. The roof of the car park is landscaped and its walls shrouded in gauzy metal mesh, softening the impact of bulk. Six access silos boldly coded by superscale graphics add a slightly surreal touch.

Progress from check-in to departure gate is marked and measured by the rise and fall of the roof and rhythm of its structure. The basic unit of support is a Y-shaped assemblage of tapering steel members anchored by concrete moorings. Painted signature Roger egg-yolk yellow, the steel members form the angular branches of the arboreal structure with the more massive concrete trunks extending down through the building. Organised around a 18 x 9m modular grid, Barajas is actually just a huge (3) and potentially extendible kit of parts, with consequent economies of scale in materials, detailing and construction time. Certain elements that were specially designed for the project, such as the vaguely anthropomorphic floor mounted air-handling units and wok-like light fittings, have since gone into general commercial production.

Tempering this High-Tech rationale is a fair dollop of spatial and experiential romance. The hypnotic swell of the roof creates different sorts of spaces--grandly lofty halls for check-in at its peaks, and more intimate areas for waiting, eating and circulation at its troughs. The obvious conceptual model is the market roof amiably sheltering teeming humanity and a diversity of activities. Some critics have also suggested that it also alludes to the rhythmic vaults of the famous Cordoba mosque. Clad in thin laminated strips of Chinese bamboo (astonishingly, each strip was individually fixed by hand), the roof has a seductive, tactile quality, like being inside a giant musical instrument. Even more lyrically, project architect Simon Smithson likens the heaving geometry to being underwater and seeing the surface of the sea softly rising and falling above you, with shafts of sunlight percolating down into the depths.

Chracterised by tactful and imaginative handling of light and views, Barajas has managed to break free from the dead hand of airport anomie. Glazed walls offer a redemptive connection with the exterior, and the harsh Madrid light is filtered and channelled around the interior through a series of oculi in the rippling roof. Light catches the creamy floor of Spanish limestone, turning it to a gleaming horizontal plane that brightens the cavernous spaces. Most dramatically of all, light sears down into the canyons, three parallel voids carved into the length of the building. As an obvious means of funnelling daylight to the arrivals hall below, these multistorey clefts also signpost the various stages of departure, from check-in to aircraft boarding. At intervals, the canyons are spanned by bridges, so departing and arriving passengers are periodically aware of each other, helping to mitigate feelings of disorientation. While the intermediate canyon provides contemplative views down into the baggage reclaim hall, the canyons at land and airside are filled with the panoply of vertical circulation. Long banks of escalators and stairs bestride the chasms, and curious glass lifts that might have sprung from the imagination of Heath Robinson scuttle busily up and down. The airside canyon is also filled with the inevitable monstrous regiment of shops, but by setting clear protocols for fit-outs, Rogers has tried to contain the dismaying effects of commercial intrusion.

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The 38 boarding gates are contained in a soaring treble-height pier, with a further 26 docked on to the satellite building (a sort of 'minime' version of the terminal), which is linked to the main complex by underground shuttle. At three quarters of a mile long, the pier seems infinite, an elegantly elongated nave articulated by the repetitive march of its arboreal structure. Along its length, the signature Rogers yellow is amplified by the full range of the colour spectrum. This apparently whimsical touch is partly an aesthetic decision, but it also assists with orientation, the colour coding of the structure matching the signage for boarding gates. As departing passengers head for the red, orange, blue or green columns, this is the end of the line; beyond are the planes, the runway and the sky. Arriving travellers make the journey in reverse, docking into and across the boarding pier nave, communing with the baggage reclaim floor at lower level and finally emerging into the brilliance and bustle of the landside canyon. The new terminal is devoted to Iberia, British Airways and their smaller commercial partners, with budget airlines kept at some remove in the existing terminals.

The romance of Barajas belies the technical feat of its realisation. It might all look effortless, but below stairs and behind the scenes is a seething netherworld of operational spaces such as the vast subterranean baggage-handling facility. Nothing stands still in this building for long, and the continuous, relentless choreography of people, planes and stuff shapes and animates the architecture. That there can also be scope in this huge, impersonal machine to create humanely scaled, dignified and even sensuous experiences is the building's remarkable trump card. With Barajas, the airport as a type finally seems to have reached an important benchmark in its short and unsatisfactory evolution, the grubby caterpillar finally transformed into a butterfly. Is it too much to hope that the civilising mission of Rogers' Spanish soft machine can help set the agenda for the next generation of airports?

(1) The budget for the main terminal, satellite and car park was [euro]1238 million. The total Barajas development budget was [euro]6000 million.

(2) The proposed train link from the new terminal to central Madrid is still under construction; it should be completed next year.

(3) Total built area, including parking and access roads, is approx 1 100 000sqm. The main terminal is 470 000sqm and the satellite 290 000sqm.