Luckily, there are still some architects working who haven’t forgotten their profession’s obligation to please the people who use their space.

Richard Rogers is one. Mr. Rogers and his firm, Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners, create buildings that offer alternative spaces — “public realm” is their phrase — where you can experience the building in a casual, relaxed way. (The square in front of the Pompidou Center in Paris, which Mr. Rogers designed with Renzo Piano, is one example.)

Moreover, Mr. Rogers’s “inside-outside” approach, which uses the building’s innards — its water pipes, ventilation ducts, escalators, etc. — as the facade itself, offers a new way of imagining a building’s interior. With the inside now outside, a building’s interior is more open and flexible — space can be converted and reconfigured without worrying about disturbing most of the building’s innards.

As a big fan of his work, I was (almost) pleased when American Airlines decided to route me through Madrid on my back way to France last year. My thinking was that Mr. Rogers, who was awarded the Pritzker, architecture’s highest honor, the year after his new terminals opened in 2006, could deliver a space, along with his collaborator, the architect Antonio Lamela, that prioritized the traveler and his needs.

The layover did not begin well. At 6 a.m., we landed at Terminal 4S, a satellite terminal. Bleary-eyed, I walked almost seven minutes to the other end of the terminal, which is lit by light fixtures that are too bright to allow you to sleep and not bright enough to read.

We were quickly whisked away via tram to a larger building, Terminal 4. Here, as with many European hubs, they don’t assign gates to flights more than an hour in advance. For those waiting, the terminal provides clusters of aqua-blue chairs that are scattered around almost haphazardly, like puddles might form after a quick rain. The banks of steel chairs have two armrests separating four chairs, which, unless you’re about 6 or younger, make it impossible to splay out.