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.
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