I've just been to the kind of presentation which I find quite irritating. It was by an architect closely involved with the design of Barcelona's new terminal 1, and he was clearly very pleased with the architectural masterpiece which had been created. Phrases like "swan's neck curves" and "Vitruvian columns" and "colours reflecting the Mediterranean, the beaches and the local forests" tripped lightly off his tongue.

One small - well, quite large, really - problem. Barcelona Airport's terminal 1 doesn't work.

Let me explain and qualify.

I reached it yesterday afternoon having got up at 5:15 in order to catch the first Dubai Metro of the day so that I could catch the 7:45 flight to Heathrow (a 7 hour flight) to connect with a 2 hour flight to Barcelona (which was an hour late because weather delayed the inbound flight).

You could argue that, four times zones from where I'd first started, I wasn't in the best frame of mind to truly appreciate the architectural splendours of the airport (and you'd be dead right) - but airports ought to expect passengers in my state to hit them. That's what real air passengers are like, guys!

Having got through the immigration smoothly, I then looked for the train - which I knew was there somewhere.

What I failed to realise was that, while it used to be accessed from a point between Terminals 1 and 2, those two terminals have now been merged as Terminal 2 and Terminal 1 (where I was) is somewhere quite, quite different.

I did manage - after a search - to find a train pictogram, which pointed me down to ground level. At ground level I hit the most irritating of signs - a train pictogram with, underneath, two arrows - one pointing left, one pointing right! Now that wasn't entirely useless - at least I knew not to go straight on - but should I turn left or right? A quick toss of a coin and up came the head of Her Majesty so I turned right. I did my best to follow the train signage - and got back to where I'd started from, having gone round in a complete circle!

So I went back up to arrivals level and asked - a sure sign, in my book, that there was a failure in the wayfinding.

"Oh, you have to catch the shuttle bus to the other terminal", was the response. "Go back downstairs and take the blue shuttle bus".

OK, did that. Not a wonderful experience because the bus was very full, and there were a lot of people standing with a lot of bags the floor and the route was quite devious, with quite a few roundabouts so people and bags were getting thrown around a bit. It was dark and you couldn't anticipate which way the bus was going to go.

Onece at Terminal 2, things improved. OK, the train pictogram had the magic word "RENFE" underneath (and EVERYONE knows what that means). OK, the moving walkway which used to assist tired and travel-weary old bones across the long connector bridge had gone. But the connector bridge still took you to the station, there was still a ticket office with a friendly English speaking person in it, and there were only a few minutes to wait for the train. A train from Barcelona had just come in and a great crowd of people flooded off, so it clearly has value!

The only other trivial issue was that the moving map on the train tv screen showed "Barca Sants" when I was expecting some variant of "Sants station" in Spanish or Catalan or both. Barca, it seems, is the abbreviation for Barcelona - EVERYONE knows that!

Other speakers from the airport authority at the conference said that the station at Terminal 1 was complete and so was the tunnel - it was just the train which was running late. Come back in 2012! Meanwhile 25 million passengers are going to use that terminal each year - and good luck to them!

But those speakers missed the point. The problem wasn't that the new train wasn't there. The problem was that the signage to the old train (which was there) was totally inadequate.

So, dear architect, the terminal failed. I wish you and some of your fellow speakers had been with me to experience my frustration last night.

The only justification for an airport terminal, dear architect, is that it is an intermodal interchange - and this one failed. The interchange facilities it offered between air and rail were bad - so bad that I, a dedicated user of public transport in general and trains in particular, nearly gave up.

Barcelona airport's terminal 1 doesn't work.