Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, born in 1907, is one of the architectural masters of the 20th century and one of the foremost pioneers of modern architecture. He is known primarily for his collaboration with Le Corbusier, his projects for Pampulha, and for the visionary Brazilian capital city of Brasilia. Through his architectural career, spanning well over six decades, he has designed hundreds of remarkable buildings and master plans. His experimentation with reinforced concrete produced curved, organic forms that marked a significant and innovative departure from the mundane orthogonal austerity of the so-called ‘International Modern Style’.
In his memoirs published in 2000, and aptly entitled The Curves of Times, he openly declares his derision for the conventional straight line by proclaiming: “I am not attracted to straight angles or to the straight line, hard and inflexible, created by man. I am attracted to free-flowing sensual curves. The curves that I find in the mountains of my country, in the sinuousness of its rivers, in the waves of the ocean, and on the body of the beloved woman. Curves make up the entire Universe, the curved Universe of Einstein”.
The wave-like forms of the reinforced concrete roofs of the Chapel of San Francisco de Assisi, Pampulha, built in 1943-44, seemingly defy gravity and are not supported by traditional load-bearing walls. In their stead, lie vast expanses of multi-coloured stained glass with artwork depicting scenes from the life of St Francis of Assisi. It was a harbinger of even grander and more innovative works to come in the conception of Brasilia.
The white dome and the vertical twin blocks of the National Congress complex are an iconic embodiment of the new Latin American modernism that became symbolic of the aspirations and coming of age of the Brazilian nation. In conceptualising his vision of Brasilia as the new capital city, President Juscelino Kubitschek engaged Niemeyer and Lucio Costa to plan the city as a shining beacon of modern architecture to all the world. For the first time in centuries, Brazilian architecture in the 50s and 60s was catapulted into the centre-stage of the modern architectural movement.
Niemeyer claimed that, as an architect, his main concern in Brasilia was to find structural solutions that would characterise the city’s architecture. So in a number of buildings he adopted columns that were so slender and thin that the palace would “seem to barely touch the earth”. He also designed the new cathedral for Brasilia, which seems to be an exercise in paper origami but transformed into slender reinforced concrete and multi-coloured stained glass.
Niemeyer has been an ardent communist throughout his life. He had joined the Brazilian Communist Party in 1945 when already an architect of some repute. He was active politically, and his leftist views would cost him dearly in his life. He visited the former Soviet Union, met with diverse socialist leaders and became a personal friend of some of them. Fidel Castro once said: “Niemeyer and I are the last Communists of this planet”. During the establishment of the military dictatorship of Brazil in 1965, his office was pillaged, the headquarters of the magazine he coordinated was destroyed, his projects mysteriously began to be refused and clients disappeared.
Soon after, as the situation deteriorated, Niemeyer had no choice but to go into exile to France. He opened an office on the Champs-Élysées in Paris and had customers in diverse countries, especially in Algeria where, among others, he designed the University of Constantine. From Paris he created the headquarters of the French Communist Party, the Place du Colonel Fabien, and in Italy that of the Mondadori publishing company. With the end of the dictatorship in 1985, following 20 years of self-imposed exile, Niemeyer went back to his home country.
In 1996, at 89 years old, he created what many consider to be his magnum opus – the Niterói Contemporary Art Museum, in the city of Niterói, next to Rio de Janeiro. The building flies from a rock, giving a beautiful view of the Guanabara Bay and the city of Rio de Janeiro. The Museum of Modern Art appears to be like an alien spaceship hovering over the top of a hill. In this case, Niemeyer embraced the use of an abstract, circular form, raised above the natural landscape – a dominant shape and form that stands in natural contraposition with the landscape. Critics of the museum say the building is so exotic that it upstages the works of art inside it.
In 2003, Niemeyer, aged 96, was called to design the Serpentine Gallery Summer Pavilion in London’s Hyde Park, a gallery that, each year, invites a famous architect who has never previously built in the United Kingdom, to design this temporary structure. Today, Niemeyer is over 99 years old and is still involved in diverse projects, mainly sculptures and readjustments of his old works which, protected by national [and in some cases international] historic heritage regulations, can only be modified by him. He is currently designing a statue of a tiger, with its mouth open, and a man. fighting it, while raising the Cuban flag against the US blockade of Cuba.
On a personal note, last November 2006, the evergreen Niemeyer, aged 98, married his longtime aide Vera Lucia Cabreira, aged 60, at his apartment in Rio de Janeiro’s Ipanema district, only a month after fracturing his hip in a fall. As he approaches the milestone of his 100th birthday, Niemeyer is rightfully considered a living legend – never ceasing to surprise the international architectural community by his creative genius and innovation.