Ode to architecture, elegy to our disaster

Locker Room: This column has a small smattering of German picked up years ago from the assiduous study of comics. Gott in Himmel! Achtung! Schnell! Schweinhund! Borussia Moenchengladbach! These are the phrases with which to get through a lengthy conversation with a chatty taxi driver in Berlin.

Not that this column's linguistic dexterity ends there. Oh no or oh nein, as I like to say. It is well known (well I know - which amounts to the same thing) that the Germans, precise people that they are, have a series of words the equivalent of which we don't have in English, words which capture abstract moods and feelings. Schadenfreude, weltschmerz etc. How useful.

I mention this only because I have been wondering for the last few days if the Germans might have a word for the feeling of looking back and, in hindsight, cringing with pure red-faced embarrassment.

I must explain. Since last Sunday I have been at seven soccer matches. I know that's an average day for Brian Kerr but for this column it's a lot of work. The matches have taken place in The Estadio da Luz and the Estadio Jose Alvalade in Lisbon, in the Estadio Cidade in Coimbra, the Estadio do Dragao in Porto and the Estadio Municipal in Aveiro.

Each venue is more stunning than the next. On Saturday, say, heading for the greatest match of recent years, that between the Czechs and the Dutch, we drove up the A1 from Lisbon to Aveiro. We got lucky, we saw an epic. And that was just the stadium. The match was wonderful but personally I'd just made the journey to see the Estadio.

John Updike once called Fenway Park in Boston a "lyric little bandbox". In Aveiro the architect Tomas Taveira has installed a lyric little paintbox. You come off the motorway and drive towards the little town and there sits the stadium up on a little hill looking like a merry-go-round painted by gifted children. It's novel and it's stunningly beautiful inside and outside. It's an argument against straight lines and conformity and everything we assume about designing these things.

It's an ode to the joy of sport.

Sitting in the stands, almost alone after the match had ended, one had the impression, still, of being in a full house. Not just because the echoes of the departing victors continued to bounce about the place but because the decision to have so many different colours of seating just randomly dotted about the place gives you the feeling that the stadium is full all the time. Hold a seashell to your ear and you think you can hear the ocean. Sit in the stadium in Aveiro and you think you can hear the crowd sing.

And in the corners, the lines of the stand dip gently while the roof goes straight on around, like an elevated running track. Through the great gaps you can see out to the wall of forest and mountain beyond, its 40 shades of green and verdantly muscular presence making a stunning contrast to this happy house of primary colours.

The stadium in Aveiro was designed - as was Sporting's wonderful new stadium, replete with shops and cinema and bowling alley just across the road from us here in Lisbon - by Tomas Taveira. He also designed the Estadio Dy Magalhaes Pessoa in Leira with its crazy, undulating roof.

I think of the UEFA suits keeping themselves up to date with the progress of Taveira's wonderful stadiums or going and having their breath taken away by Souto Moura's stadium in Braga, which one of their number described as a work of art, or gaping in wonder at the Dragao in Porto or the new Stadium of Light in Lisbon or being stirred by the beauty of Damon Lavelle's billowing sail design for the roof of the Estadio Algarve. And then I think of the suits coming to Dublin and looking at our tawdry, cheap little plans for inserting ourselves into Euro 2008's cash action. Lordy!

I've only ever been to Portugal for football purposes. First came here with Big Jack's ageing side for a 3-0 hammering on a manky wet night in the old Stadium of Light.

I remember the drive in from the airport, passing the old Sporting stadium and the old Stadium of Light and being disappointed not just by how old and dowdy both grounds were but how depressed the city was, how it looked to be teetering on the edge of poverty and ruin.

Less than a decade on you wouldn't recognise the place. Money has lifted it of course but architecture has been at the centre of all debate and discussion through that process. The Expo, the European City of Culture (Porto) the building of the Belem Cultural Centre on the outskirts of Lisbon, all these things have kept architecture at the centre of the national discourse in Portugal.

If you wonder what it means to be Portuguese you get part of the answer in the boldness of the imagination which has gone into their buildings. Wonder what it means to be Irish? Well umm . . . when a large chunk of the old part of Lisbon burned down in the late 1980s there was intense debate as to how it should be rebuilt. When an Italian designed the rather austere Belem Centre, Taveira commented caustically that it was a pity that it couldn't have been designed by an architect with better taste. Taveira's own monumental Amoreiras shopping centre in Lisbon is a massive living testimony to his own neo-modernist tastes.

Architects are personalities in Portugal in a way that they cannot be back at home. Taveira himself was once responsible for almost bringing a Portuguese government down in the late '80s. A man of large and bold appetites, he was part-owner, back then, of a lively night spot called Banana Power but during office hours was given to a series of energetic infidelities which took place with a large assortment of women in the humble venue of his office couch.

Remarkably, he taped these adventures, going so far as to brush back the women's hair so that the camera could pick up their faces as they writhed and rolled. Inevitably, a personal highlights tape got stolen and found its way to the offices of several magazines and newspapers.

The faces peering out from over the shoulder of the great architect were those of noted Portuguese socialites and the wives of highly placed Government officials. Just to keep the story interesting, the publications printed the pictures but blurred out the faces. Every woman in Portugal was linked with Taveira's couch and the story almost tipped the Government over when Anibal Cavala Silva, the prime minister at the time, went public and demanded an end to the slandering of cuckolded ministers. Wonderful.

From that culture, which makes stars out of people who can actually think, the Portuguese have created a modern nation which appreciates its own past and is excited and enthralled by the possibilities of its present. The architecture of the stadiums we have been living in doesn't just reflect the doodlings of some people with drawing boards, it reflects the broader culture of the world around and it mirrors the intense cultural pride of the Portuguese.

Think of our own stadium debate, think of the crabby physical legacy of the Celtic Tiger years, think of the bland ugliness of Eircom Park or the wasteful stupidity underpinning the Bertie Bowl. Think of the suits coming to see what we were going to bowl them over with, think of them arriving with memories of Portugal fresh in their heads. If the Germans don't have a word for that sort of embarrassment, they should have.

And remember if you are ever actually at a Borussia Moenchengladbach game and want to make a complete schweinhund of yourself you begin by shouting, "Achtung! Schnell! Give us a B, now give us an O . . ."