CHECK OUT IN THE ECONOMIST_Obituary: Oscar Niemeyer

SOURCE/LINK: http://www.economist.com/blogs/americasview/2012/12/obituary?zid=305&ah=417bd5664dc76da5d98af4f7a640fd8a

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Obituary

Oscar Niemeyer

Dec 6th 2012, 17:45 by H.J. | SÃO PAULO AND M.R. | LONDON

Oscar Niemeyer attends an event marking his 100th birthday in Rio de Janeiro

AP

The Roman Catholic Cathedral in Brasília

AFP

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MORE than any other individual, Oscar Niemeyer could claim to have created Brazil's image as a self-consciously modern country. Brazil's most famous architect turned the functionalism of Le Corbusier into a sensual minimalism that was at once daring and restrained. His motto was not that "form follows function" but that "form follows beauty". Like the functionalists he worked in reinforced concrete, but found poetry in it. He rejected right angles in favour of the "liberated, sensual curves" found 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"—shapes displayed in the stunning setting and bright, clear sunlight of his home city, Rio de Janeiro.

After a youth spent in Rio's bars and brothels and his father's printing workshop, he joined the practice of Lúcio Costa, one of Brazil's most influential modernist architects with whom he would enjoy a lengthy partnership. His first big commission was for another man who would become a close friend, Juscelino Kubitschek, then the mayor of Belo Horizonte, who hired Niemeyer to design a set of public buildings for Pampulha, a new suburb. They included a church that a fellow modernist, Oswald de Andrade, described as "the only cathedral still capable of inspiring conversion".

Further commissions for public buildings in Rio followed. Most of the buildings in São Paulo's Ibirapuera park, inaugurated in 1954, were designed by him, including an auditorium only recently built to his original design: a white trapezoid punctuated by a vivid red flame that shelters the entrance. There was also a collaboration—not without tensions—with Le Corbusier to design the United Nations headquarters in New York.

But it is Brasília, Brazil's modernist capital in the arid, empty interior plateau, with which Mr Niemeyer's name has become inextricably associated. Niemeyer recalled later that Kubitschek, elected Brazil's president in 1955, turned up in his house in Rio and said, "Oscar, we built Pampulha and now we're going to build Brasília". And they did.

An international jury chose a modernist plan scribbled on a piece of paper by Costa for a city laid out in the shape of a plane, filled with serried concrete boxes of apartment blocks, hotels and offices, each in their allocated quarters. The city's addresses ("SQN 303, Bl. C, 101") have all the poetry of machine code. But along the plane's central axis are arrayed Mr Niemeyer's palaces, light and jewel-like with their curving concrete ribs, with open ramps instead of steps.

The Cathedral, an abstract interpretation of cupped hands as 16 concrete columns spaced with vast stained-glass panels, fills with light during the day and shines out at night. The National Congress is two tall, thin blocks towering over a single low sweep that supports two huge white bowls. The larger one, upturned, represents the lower house and is often taken to symbolise its openness to all people and political thought (though cynics see it as a begging bowl that cruelly satirises the corruption of politics). The smaller one, downturned, represents the Senate, which has a more inward-looking, reflective role.

A lifelong communist, Mr Niemeyer spent most of the 21 years in which Brazil was ruled by a military dictatorship in Europe. He visited the Soviet Union and designed the Paris headquarters for the French Communist Party. But for him communism was more an abstract Utopia than everyday politics.

He returned to Brazil in 1985, and carried on working from his penthouse studio overlooking Copacabana beach until weeks before his death. He designed the Rio Sambadrome, where the city's carnival is staged, and then a similar stadium for São Paulo. The Contemporary Art Museum in Niteroi, across Guanabara Bay from Rio, resembling a flying saucer docking for a day trip at the beach, was completed in 1996. Responding to news of his death, Brazil's president, Dilma Rousseff, quoted his words: "We have to dream, otherwise things don't happen," and added her own tribute: "Few dreamed so intensely, or made as many things happen, as he did."

^{Correction: The Contemporary Art Museum in Niteroi was completed in 1996, not 2006 as originally stated. This was corrected on}