At any one moment some 800,000 people are flying on aircraft. So, imagine just how many air passengers there are in any 24-hour period, let alone a month or a year. And, think of how all these millions have to be processed - a horrid but appropriate word - through thousands of airports.

No matter how hard even the world’s best architects have tried, the airport is a difficult building type with which to fall in love. The reality is that many passengers rarely give much of a second glance at the quality of the architecture around them.

And, yet, there are airports that do have a special ability to encourage us to look up and around, airports that have been designed one way or another to offer something of the adventure and poetry of flight even in an era of mass travel and budget fares. Here are some of the best airports – in terms of design and atmosphere – in our extraordinarily busy and increasingly itinerant world.

Chek Lap Kok (Hong Kong International), Terminal 1, Hong Kong

This huge, airy and elegant airport was built to coincide with the handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China in 1997, although the opening took place the following year. The vast Terminal 1, designed to look like a giant airliner by Foster and Partners, sits on top of a landfill extension of Hong Kong. Chep Lap Kok is characterised by lightweight steel and glass roofs, clear passenger routes, carefully modulated daylight, commanding views out to the aircraft and a vast central “market square”.

General Cesareo L Berisso International Airport, Montevideo, Uruguay