Madrid Barajas Airport, Spain (2005). Richard Rogers achieved a rare thing in Madrid: creating an airport that doesn’t make you desperate to escape. From its gently undulating bamboo ceiling, to its forest of rainbow-coloured branching columns, to the large circular openings that bring daylight deep into its lower levels, itprovides a soothing balm for the stresses of international travel. Designed with Estudio Lamela, it has a calming quality that is hard to convey in photographs, from the soft acoustic to the merciful lack of fluorescent lighting.

Sala Beckett, Barcelona, Spain (2014). An ingenious reworking of a 1920s workers’ club into a new theatre, the Sala Beckett shows how adaptive reuse can be a magical art form and how materials can be mined from a site and redeployed with added value. Think John Soane meets Gordon Matta-Clark. Architects Flores y Prats conducted an exhaustive archaeological survey of every element of the building before taking their chainsaw and scalpel to remake it in the most exquisite bricolage, crafting a place that revels in the layers of history once latent in the site... [+]