As an architect, he soared

Just this once, I wish I could write with pictures instead of words. That would make it easier to explain why the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, who died Wednesday at 104, was one of my heroes.

Not for his politics, of course — he was, to the end, an avowed communist — but for his glorious buildings, which are freedom itself, sketched in concrete and glass. It is ironic that a man committed to an atheistic ideology designed one of the great religious structures of the world, the Metropolitan Cathedral of Our Lady Aparecida, in Brazil’s futuristic capital, Brasilia.

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