Madrid's Barajas Airport by Richard Rogers Opened

Madrids Barajas Airport by Richard Rogers Opened
Last week saw the opening of the largest project ever undertaken by the Richard Rogers Partnership (RRP): a new terminal at Madrid's Barajas Airport, more than one million square metres of buildings with a budget of €1bn.

This teeming hub, punctuated by light-filled courtyards and topped with a soothing, seagull-wing bamboo roof, is a typical Rogers project: integrated into the urban fabric, preoccupied not just by the needs of the client, but by the city as a whole.

It has been a big week for the RRP, because the new Welsh Assembly building also opened for business (though it won't be formally inaugurated by Prince Charles until St David's Day, on 1 March).

Originally commissioned in 1988, the Assembly building may have been a long time coming, but it has been worth waiting for.

The steel, glass slate and timber structure overlooking the sea, with its transparency and public spaces, looks set to become one of Britain's finest modern monuments.

You'd never guess from Lord Rogers's schedule or, indeed, anything much else about him that he is in his seventies.

He even speaks fast, the Italian-inflected words tumbling over one another in their urgency to get out of his head, presumably before he has to leave them behind and get on another plane.