The 10 best airports

El Prat de Llobregat, Barcelona

Most airports are in denial, or at least their architects are. They think they're works of transport engineering, when really they're shopping malls with a transport function attached – BAA is said to make more money out of retail than flights. Barcelona's Terminal 2, completed in 1991, makes a virtue of this fact. It treats the airport as an unusual kind of city, with broad urbane avenues, highly polished purplish marble, big glass walls, dignified concrete and ample proportions. As a result it is much more relaxing than airports where you feel like a piece of baggage on its way to the carousel. Its architect, Ricardo Bofill, has recently also completed the rebuilt Terminal 1.

Santos Dumont, Rio de Janeiro

Since the 1998 closure of Kai Tak, Hong Kong, with its thrilling descent past mountains and above apartment blocks, the approach to Santos Dumont Rio de Janeiro, is unrivalled as the best in the world. Planes wheel past the Sugarloaf mountain and down to a short waterside landing strip that requires special training for pilots. Then a stroll through the terminal takes you almost into the heart of a great city – which is air travel as it should be but almost never is. The airport, which now serves only domestic flights, is named after a great Brazilian aviator and dandy, and its original terminal is a refined work of 1930s modernism.

Dulles Washington DC

Before his death at the age of 51, Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen designed two celebrations of the jet age that reinvented the design of airports. One, the freeform TWA terminal at JFK, has been compromised by later additions, and is currently closed for refurbishment. The other is Washington Dulles, built in 1962, whose concrete roof, concave side down, hangs like a canvas between rows of angled pillars. It pioneered the idea of the sweeping roof as a metaphor for flight that has since become a well-worn theme of airport design, while its white, temple-like form also has some of the gravitas ofWashington's political monuments.

Kansai Osaka

After Norman Foster's Stansted of 1991 gave new impetus to Saarinen's big-roof concept, Renzo Piano's Kansai airport gave it its most impressive realisation in 1994. The roof rises and falls like a big wave, before neatly morphing into the long, tapering tubes that get you to the departure gates. Built on an artificial island, it looks beautiful from above, with all the complexity of an airport resolved into a single silvery object. It also deals with the inevitable retail better than most, by stowing it into deep canyons under the roof. The fact that the island used to sink at an alarming rate need not worry you too much.

Chek Lap Kok, Hong Kong

Norman Foster's practice Foster and Partners has designed three impressive airports – Stansted, Chek Lap Kok in Hong Kong, and the enormous new Terminal 3 in Beijing. Of these Hong Kong gets my vote, Stansted being too compromised by later changes, while Beijing has slightly queasy-making Chinese references: it is allegedly dragon-like, and takes its red-gold colours from the Forbidden City. Hong Kong has a calm, rhythmic series of vaults with views through big glass walls to planes and mountains. As at Stansted and Beijing the design still gets embarrassed by the presence of shops, as if it were hoping they would go away. They won't, and airport architects should get used to it.

Barajas, Madrid

Barajas, Madrid, by Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners, is yet another swoopy roof, but the simple idea of lining the ceiling with bamboo gives it a different feeling. It is soothing, rather than mechanical. Steel struts are painted in all colours of the rainbow, grading from red to violet along the length of the building – a potentially cheesy idea that comes off. The joyfulness of Barajas compared with the clunkier Terminal 5 at Heathrow (which was designed by the same architects) says much about the way this country goes about getting big buildings built.

Charles de Gaulle, Paris

The original terminal building of Charles de Gaulle airport, completed in 1974, is the sort of futuristic fantasy for which the French have a special talent. A great concrete cylinder, its central void is criss-crossed by glass tubes, enclosing smooth-moving travelators as if in a Dalek city. On the outside, roads sweep up high on its flanks on vertiginous bridges. Designed by Paul Andreu, a French architect whose most famous work it is, it is playful and inspiring at the same time. Pleasure in its design is limited, however, by knowing about the fatal collapse of part of the later Terminal 2E, in 2004.

Banjul Gambia

Banjul Airport, Gambia, wins a prize for its sheer indifference to all the usual clichés and conventions of airport design. True, it goes like many others for something a bit wing-like, but the gratuitous projections at its sides are nothing like the swoops of Saarinen or Piano. It also goes, for no particular reason, for an arch in its centre with a bigger inverted arch above. A tongue-like canopy then sticks out from the mouth-like arch. The work of the Senegalese Pierre Goudiaby Atepa, its main design principle would appear to be to do stuff for the sheer hell of it.

Changi, Singapore

I don't know why so many airports are designed as metaphors for flight. Why do you need a metaphor when you've got the real thing? Why not have a metaphor for the ground on which you're landing? In any case Singapore Changi Airport has always opted instead for symbols – not metaphors exactly – of opulence. They like fish tanks, fountains and verdant planting, and school parties are taken round in obedient crocodiles to admire it all. Since 2008 it has also included its Terminal 3, by American architects SOM. The roof is as flat as the many football pitches it equals in area, but is fitted with an intricate system of shutters and louvres that filter the light in intriguing pixellated patterns. It's a bit bling, but in a nice way.

King Abdulaziz Jeddah

SOM also designed Jeddah airport, which, as the place of arrival for Mecca, handles a huge increase in passenger numbers during the annual hajj. SOM created a 120-acre canopy composed as a series of tents. It could have been patronising, and I confess I haven't seen it in person, but the effect looks impressive in photographs. It was completed in 1981, and it's hard to imagine an American practice being given a commission of such sensitivity to Muslims now. Indeed, at the time of writing, someone has described SOM on Wikipedia as "futki", which in the Bangladeshi dialect of Sylheti means "arsehole".