SOURCE/LINK:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/americasview/2012/12/obituary?zid=305&ah=417bd5664dc76da5d98af4f7a640fd8a
The Americas
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
1 / 16
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
