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It鈥檚 not often that I get a rush of excitement when I find myself going into a new building, but it does happen. It happened the first time I went into Michael and Patti Hopkins鈥� awe-inspiring Westminster Underground station on the Jubilee Line. The British Library entrance hall isn鈥檛 bad and the fifth-floor restaurant on the top of Harvey Nicks was delicious.

But Barajas airport in Madrid is simply astonishing. I鈥檇 spent the previous day in Barcelona, wandering around two Gaud铆 apartment blocks, the gothic cathedral (with its open-air cloister complete with geese) and the sublime Picasso Museum in the Ramblas, so I was in a very pro-Iberian mood. This was much enhanced by my experience of its brand new 300km/h train, which got us into Madrid (a similar distance to that between London and Edinburgh) in two hours and 20 minutes, with Dave Brubeck on the in-carriage headphones as dusk fell. So I was definitely up for it when my brother asked if I wanted to have a look at the new terminal.

What I鈥檇 read about Barajas was that the whole project had worked well as a collaborative effort. 鈥淲e are a Spanish aviation company and we need a new airport. We鈥檙e going to build it here, in the middle of nowhere. We鈥檇 like to appoint you, Lord Rogers, to be our big-time superstar architect because we like what we鈥檝e seen, and we鈥檝e got a firm of local architects, Estudio Lamela, to help you with the idiosyncracies of the local construction industry, aka Ferrovial. Can we get a wiggle on please?鈥�

The first thing I see is six or seven vast multistorey car parks. Insitu concrete spirals with huge concrete decks on six or seven levels. What really lifts them is the sculptural quality of the concrete, contrasted with the fantastically fine mesh infill between the floors. This is all brought to life with huge graphics and red-and-green winking lights at each floor level, in front of each aisle and over each parking bay, which tell you if there are any spaces on a floor, and if so, where to find them.

Once you鈥檙e out of the car, you鈥檙e practically in the terminal. Within a few yards, you鈥檙e already on your first trottoir roulant heading across the concourse. It鈥檚 always more dramatic when these places are half-empty and relatively quiet, but apparently Barajas is so huge that it鈥檚 pretty quiet even when packed.

I wasn鈥檛 actually flying, but I鈥檓 sure that if I were, the building would dissipate the disorientation I usually associate with airports

Like all airports these days, it鈥檚 a big shed. But what a sexy shed. The roof is a series of undulating M-shaped curves, with raking steel props descending to Y-shaped concrete supports. It鈥檚 like a giant model of a Leonardo da Vinci flying machine, or an explanatory skeleton of a gull鈥檚 wing. The metal is painted yellow (or blue or green, depending where you are) and the ceiling is covered with bamboo ribs, like a vast pinoleum place mat. The light is bounced up to and off this so you can鈥檛 see any lamps. There is lots of Rogers鈥� Dan Dare imagery, such as the inclined air-con units, which look like hair dryers or periscopes.

The great thing is that when you get up close to all this high-tech wizzardry, it鈥檚 all very basic. The concrete haunches that support the bases of the enormous steels, far from having the silky-smooth finish you鈥檇 find in a car show room, are actually pocked with blister holes and have been filled and painted by hand. The bolts on the top are fantastically matter-of-fact. I wasn鈥檛 actually flying, but I鈥檓 sure that if I were, the building would dissipate the disorientation I usually associate with airports.

Wandering about in that fabulous space, you feel that it鈥檚 been a great success; that people like working in it, that people liked working on it, that people like using it. And yet, for something so vast, innovative and stimulating, a brief study shows that it has all been put together much more as an exercise in can-do pragmatism than look-at-me extravagance. I read somewhere the working drawings were completed in five months. On a programme like that, the value engineers don鈥檛 have time to put the batteries in their calculators before the steel fixers have put the bloody frames up.

I wonder if Terminal 5, with its 20-year gestation period and its ground-testing of every conceivable form of procurement, will offer the same scintillating and exuberant experience that Barajas does.