Encyclopedia
Oscar Niemeyer Soares Filho is a
Brazilian
architect who is considered one of the most important names in international
modern architecture. He was a pioneer in the exploration of the constructive possibilities of
reinforced concrete.
Although he was a defender of utilitarianism, his creations did not have the blocky coldness frequently criticized by post-modern critics. His buildings have forms so dynamic and curves so sensual that many admirers say that he is more monumental as a
sculptor than as an
architect. Some critics consider this trait to be a defect.
Oscar Niemeyer and his contribution to the construction of the city of
Brasília is portrayed and somewhat
parodied in the 1964
French movie
L'homme de Rio , starring
Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Early life
Oscar Niemeyer was born in the city of
Rio de Janeiro in 1907, on a street that later would receive the name of his grandfather Ribeiro de Almeida. He spent his youth as a typical young Carioca of the time:
bohemian and relatively unconcerned with his future. He concluded his secondary education at age 21. The same year, he married Annita Baldo, daughter of Italian immigrants from
Padua. Marriage gave him a sense of responsibility: he decided to work and enter university.
He started to work in his father's
typography house and entered the Escola de Belas Artes, from which he graduated as engineer architect in 1934. At the time he had financial difficulties but decided to work without fee anyway, in the architecture studio of Lúcio Costa and Carlos Leão. He felt unsatisfied with the architecture that he saw in the streets and believed he could find a career there.
In 1945, already an
architect of some repute, he joined the Brazilian Communist Party. Niemeyer was a boy at the time of the
Russian Revolution of 1917, and by the
Second World War he became a young idealist. He was enthusiastically communist, a position which would cost him much later in his life. During the
military dictatorship of Brazil his office was raided and he was forced into exile in Europe. The Minister of Aeronautics of the time reportedly said that "the place for a communist architect is
Moscow." He visited the
USSR, 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."
First works
In 1936, Lúcio Costa was appointed by Education Minister Gustavo Capanema architect of the new headquarters for the Ministry of Education and Public Health in
Rio de Janeiro. In 1939, Niemeyer assumed the leadership of the team of architects responsible for the Ministry that had assumed the task of shaping the ‘novo homem, Brasileiro e moderno’ .
The project, named Capanema Palace, in 1935, was extremely bold for the time. It was the first government
modernist building in the Americas, and of a much larger scale than anything Le Corbusier had built until then. Completed in 1943, the building which housed the regulator and manager of Brazilian culture and cultural heritage developed all the elements of what was to become recognised as Brazilian modernist movement: it employed local materials and techniques, like the azulejos linked to the Portuguese tradition; the revolutionised Corbusian brises-soleil, made adjustable and related to the Moorish shading devices of colonial architecture; bold colours; the tropical gardens of
Roberto Burle Marx; the Imperial Palm , known as the Brazilian order; further allusions to the icons of the Brazilian landscape; and the integrated, specially commissioned works of Brazilian artists.
In 1939 Niemeyer traveled with Lúcio Costa to design the Brazilian pavilion in the
New York World's Fair. At a time when Europe and the United States were concentrating their industrial powers on
World War II, Brazil was investing in architecture. The country placed itself in the vanguard of international modernist architecture, where it remained until decades later, in large part thanks to the talent of Niemeyer.
The Pampulha project
In 1940 Niemeyer met
Juscelino Kubitschek, who was at the time the mayor of
Belo Horizonte, capital of the
state of Minas Gerais. He and Minas Gerais Governor Benedito Valadares wanted to develop a new suburb to the north of the city called Pampulha, and commissioned Niemeyer to design a series of buildings to be known as the "Pampulha complex".
The buildings were completed in 1943, and provoked some controversy. They received international acclaim following the 1942 exhibition of Brazilian architecture at the New York Museum of Modern Art . The conservative Church authorities of Minas Gerais refused to consecrate the Church of Saint Francis of Assisi, in part due to its unorthodox form, in part due to the
mural painted by
Candido Portinari and the fact that it contained no confessional. The mural depicts Christ as the saviour of the ill, the poor and, most importantly, the sinner.
In Pampulha, Niemeyer started to mark his style: he used the structural properties of the armed concrete to give sinuous forms to the building. When Niemeyer draws a building he makes it with the minimum of possible traces, as organic and trembling as a gesture of the hand. However, he denies that his buildings have an aesthetic more important than function: he often wrote elaborate justifications of the details of his projects, wherein he described the function of each curve of the building. He said that if he could not justify an idea in one paragraph, he gave it up. Also later he would say that a form that conveys beauty is useful in itself.
In 1947, his world-wide recognition was confirmed when Niemeyer traveled to the
United States to design the
headquarters of the
United Nations in
New York. In the previous year he had received an invitation to teach at
Yale University; however, his visa was denied because of his socialist beliefs. In 1950 the first book about his work was published in the USA by Stamo Papadaki.
In Brazil, he designed
São Paulo's Ibirapuera Park and in 1951 the COPAN Apartment Building, and the JK Building in Belo Horizonte. In 1952 he built his own house in
Rio de Janeiro, the House at Canoas , and in 1954 the Niemeyer luxury apartment building, in Belo Horizonte.
In 1954 he was called to design the Museum of Modern Art of Caracas . It was the first work where Niemeyer worked in order to create a symbol: architecture as a symbol. This kind of strategy was used later in Brasilia's projects. The building never was constructed but the drawings and the pictures of the model let us see Niemeyer's future style.
Then Juscelino Kubitschek, elected
president of Brazil in 1956, once again came in contact with Niemeyer. This time his plans were far more ambitious: he put Niemeyer in the head of Novacap, a project to move the national capital to a depopulated region in the center of the country.
Brasília
Niemeyer organized a competition for the urbanistic lay-out of
Brasília, the new capital, and the winner was the project of his old master and great friend, Lúcio Costa. Niemeyer would design the buildings and Lucio the plan of the city.
In the space of a few months, Niemeyer designed a large number of residential, commercial and government buildings. Among them were the residence of the President , the House of the deputy, the National Congress, the
Cathedral of Brasília , diverse ministries, not to mention residential buildings. Viewed from above, the city can be seen to have elements that repeat themselves in every building, giving it a formal unity. The cathedral of Brasília is especially beautiful, with diverse modern symbolism. Its entrance is a dimly-lit corridor that contrasts with the bright, naturally illuminated hall.
Behind the construction of Brasília lay a monumental campaign to construct an entire city in the barren center of the country, thousands of kilometers from any major city. The brainchild of Kubitschek, his aims included stimulating the national industry, integrating the country's distant areas, populating inhospitable regions, and bringing progress to a region where only cattle ranching had a foothold . Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa used it to test new concepts of city planning: streets without transit , buildings floating off the ground supported by columns and allowing the space underneath to be free and integrated with nature.
The project also had a socialist ideology: in Brasília all the apartments would be owned by the government and rented to its employees. Brasília did not have "nobler" regions, meaning that top ministers and common laborers would share the same building. Of course many of these concepts were ignored or changed by other presidents with different visions in later years. Brasília was designed, constructed, and inaugurated within four years. After it, Niemeyer was nominated head chief of the college of architecture of the University of Brasília. In 1963, he became an honorary member of the
American Institute of Architects in the United States; the same year, he received a Soviet prize, the
Lenin peace prize.
In 1964, after being invited by
Abba Hushi, the mayor of
Haifa,
Israel, to plan the campus of the
University of Haifa, he came back to a completely different Brazil. In March president
João Goulart, who succeeded president
Jânio Quadros in 1961, was deposed in a
military coup. General
Castelo Branco assumed command of the country, which would remain a dictatorship until 1985.
Exile and projects overseas
The leftist position of Niemeyer would cost him much during the
CIA-backed
Cold War military dictatorship. His office was pillaged, the headquarters of the magazine he coordinated was destroyed, his projects mysteriously began to be refused and clients disappeared.
In 1965, two hundred professors asked for his resignation from the University of Brasília, in protest against the government treatment of universities. In the same year he traveled to
France for an exhibition in the
Louvre museum.
In the following year, his work hindered in Brazil, Niemeyer moved to Paris. There he started a new phase of his life and workmanship. He opened an office on the
Champs-Élysées, and had customers in diverse countries, especially in
Algeria where, among others he designed the University of Constantine. In Paris he created the headquarters of the French Communist Party,
Place du Colonel Fabien, and in
Italy that of the Mondadori publishing company. In
Funchal on Madeira and old hotel from the 19th century was removed to build a Casino by Niemeyer.
Another prominent design of his was the Penang State Mosque in
George Town the state capital of
Penang,
Malaysia in 1970s.
1980s to the present
The dictatorship lasted 21 years, until 1985. Under
João Figueiredo's rule it softened and gradually turned into a democracy. At this time Niemeyer decided to return to his country. He himself defines this time as the beginning of the last phase of his life. During that decade he made the Memorial Juscelino Kubitschek , the Pantheon and the Latin America Memorial , the last a beautiful sculpture representing the wounded hand of
Jesus, whose wound bleeds in the shape of
Central and
South America.
In 1988 Oscar Niemeyer was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize, together with the American architect
Gordon Bunshaft.
He designed at least two more buildings in Brasilia, small ones that are arguably among his greatest, the and the .
In 1996, at 89 years old, he created what many consider his greatest work: the
Niterói Contemporary Art Museum . The building flies from a rock, giving a beautiful view of the
Guanabara Bay and the city of Rio de Janeiro. Critics of the museum say the building is so exotic that it upstages the works of art inside it.
In 2003, Niemeyer was called to design the
Serpentine Gallery Summer Pavilion in Hyde Park
London, a gallery that each year invites a famous architect who has never previously built in the UK, to design this temporary structure.
On December 10, 2004, a
tombstone of Communist Carlos Marighella, in
Salvador,
Bahia was inaugurated to celebrate the 35th anniversary of his death. The tombstone was designed by Niemeyer.
In 2005, one of his project entitled "ESTAÇÃO CIÊNCIA, CULTURA e ARTES " was approved to be built at
Joao Pessoa, the easternmost point of the
Americas, at 34º 47' 38" west longitude and 7º 9' 28" south latitude .
Today, Niemeyer is over 98 and still involved in diverse projects, mainly sculptures and readjustments of old works of his that, protected by national historic heritage regulations, can only be modified by him. He is currently designing a statue showing a tiger with its mouth open and a man fighting it raising the Cuban flag against the US blockade of Cuba.
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