Niemeyer Redux

I was walking through the Ferreira park in Avilés thinking about the Niemeyer when it struck me that the idea for his building is in direct homage to the library- an indifferent building in the centre.  Here you can see the sign pointing to the library and the poster on the door that tells you the place is closed- pretty much indefinitely it seems, whilst they refit it with new shelves.

It really doesn't need much comment: look at the photos.  It seems clear to me that the curve is directly taken from the earlier building, even though that building is not of any great quality!

The Library and Cultural Centre

Niemeyer Lands in Avilés

Hospitals that look like airports, shopping centres that disguise their dull, rectangular edges with twinkle and apartment buildings that land on the town's green spaces freshly minted from the how-to manual of asceptic living: architecture is a shoddy discipline here, re-using cheap concepts and shitty materials.  In this environment a building by the centagenarian Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer arrives with the freshness and quality of another age, another place.

His great triumph is to go beyond utility.  I look at his curve and dome thinking, 'What's the point of this?'  And when I am fully staisfied that there is none, I rejoice in it.  Niemeyer's fame and pulling power towers over the not inconsiderable vanity and conceit of Avilés's local politicians.  The technocrats and engineers trolley out their tired old justifications for this grand project: 'a centre of innovation', 'a bio-zone', 'an international venue for the arts' while a moth-like Brad Pitt flutters around the flame attracting the attention of other smaller insects.

This building, however, will be a Niemeyer.  I find it appealing to think of the crappy apartment buildings and shopping centres falling into the ground, capsized by their poor design and lousy workmanship whilst buildings like the Niemeyer or the Gehry in Bilbao continue to a posterity that will value them, not as a tool to revitalise a polluted provincial town, but as the swansong of a powerful creative mind that strangely came to rest on the northern shores of Spain.

The Rain in Spain

Fernando doesn’t want to go to New York: he is perfectly happy with Grado and Asturias.  Grado, since it was threaded on the new motorway, has crusted over with apartment buildings and retail warehouses, with the rapidity of that primary school science project where you grow crystals on blotting paper- hardly a jewel.  Its surrounding hills have not been scoured and planted with eucalyptus to the same extent as nearby Salas or the area around Avilés but the untidy invader can still be seen in plantations waving its slender trunk in the wind and rain.  Ah, the rain.

The area is shrouded in clouds that blow in off the sea, nestle around the mountains and squeeze out their juices on a landscape that is as green as Ireland when the sun shines.  Grado, where the Nalón and Cubia meet, is shrouded in morning mist that lazily wafts up the valleys as the day progresses.  The pavement cracks grow moss and mould, the walls of the tenement buildings ooze black from car pollution trapped in the moist air and the few remaining tiled roofs sprout ferns and grasses.  Grado’s element is water: it falls from the sky, it rises from the ground and it hangs in the air in dense banks of humidity.  It’s a curious choice for sentimental affection.

Yet Fernando doesn’t want to go to New York.  He is absolutely serious.  This is no petulant dogmatism like that of my friend Freddy from Namibia who refused to go to the USA because of the way it had raped his home country.  No, Fernando is happy in the land of mists and moulds.  He is happy living with his mother at the age of fifty, allowing the women in the house to tell him what to wear, eat and watch on the television and he is happy walking out at the weekend to the market in Grado, where he will see familiar friends de toda la vida to have a coffee and hang out.

When he walks through the streets of a town that has been bludgeoned by development I wonder if Fernando sees a different place, the Grado of his childhood.  And since these modern buildings will not last for more than a generation, will the youth of today, grown old and nostalgic, look back on these times as though they were innocent?

Horreos and Pegollos

An hórreo is a barn on legs topped with saddlestones, or pegollos, of a type familiar from some traditional British farm architecture. The idea is to keep the rats and mice out of the storage area by providing an insuperable barrier.

This hórreo belongs to my neighbour Severo.  They are protected by law as a typical expression of Asturian agricultural architecture and there is a great deal of regional diversity that makes it an interesting pastime to investigate the differences.  Occasionally they are graced with some rustic carving of the omnipresent circular motif and this gives an additional touch of charm.

Spanish law divides your property into moveable and unmoveable goods and the hórreo was defined as a moveable good, because the whole thing can be taken down and reassembled in another place without too much bother.  Take a close look and you will see that there were no nails used in its construction: the timbers overlap and interlock.  Impressive timbers- impressive rural craftsmanship.