A complex and sophisticated building described by its authors as an exercise in functional character and simplicity. It never the less demands a long list of metaphors and superlatives to describe its exemplary sustainability, surface complexity and success as a local and national cultural magnet. The authors describe it as ‘a wilderness claimed by its inhabitants’ with the ‘geological innards of the mountain-like form’ housing a 1000 seat theatre. Here, the gelatinous luminosity of the ‘insect exoskeleton’ ceiling gives any show on stage a run for its money.

The ambitious program activates sport and dance halls, art and children’s galleries to dish out a feast of early childhood education, including the teaching of robotics. Given this programmatic extravaganza, there is still little chance that the architecture of the exterior will go unnoticed. The green roofed prismatic mountain mass intentionally and correctly speaks a different language to its surrounding forest of vertically extruded housing stalagmites.

In the same vein, the pixelated facades of the Youth Palace belong simultaneously to the genealogies of Dazzleships and Van Doesberg. These fields of light and colour are by night, an aestheticised oil refinery or a high-modernist’s Coney Island. This is an export of some import.