Richard Rogers collected the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Stirling Prize in front of 800 fellow architects at the Roundhouse theatre in Camden, London, last night.

As he received the £20,000 prize to a standing ovation, Lord Rogers described his £1.2 billion building at Madrid’s Barajas airport, with its mile-long wavy roof designed to look like billowing clouds tethered to the ground, as “the greatest experience I’ve had in architecture since the Pompidou Centre (his 1970s building in Paris).

“It’s great to win this award any time but what makes it all the more important is that this prize is in the name of the late Jim Stirling, my professor and friend.”

Earlier, Rogers, who with his fellow septuagenarian Lord Foster has dominated British architecture for decades, contrasted the support he had received in Spain with the generally poor state of design in Britain. “I get depressed sometimes when I see what’s happening outside,” he said.

Although Rogers has never before made it beyond the shortlist for the prize, Foster has won twice — for the Swiss Re, or “Gherkin”, office tower in the City of London, and the Imperial War Museum at RAF Duxford, near Cambridge.

The judges of the competition, run by the Royal Institute of British Architects, praised Rogers’s building as as “an infinitely extendable tour de force”.

“The sinuous, lightweight consistency of the bamboo slatted lining contrasts with the modular repetition of the gymnastic steel roof structure,” they said.

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