Oscar Niemeyer

Brazilian architect

• Date of birth: December 15, 1907
• Place of birth: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• Date of death: December 5, 2012
• Place of death: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Oscar Niemeyer was one of a key group of architects who designed the first public building to embody the concepts of modern architecture while at the same time giving a distinctly Brazilian flavor to the modern international architectural style. His largest and most important project was creating Brasília, a new capital city for Brazil, and he was part of the team that designed the United Nations Building in New York City.

Early Life

Oscar Niemeyer was born to a well-to-do Rio de Janeiro family on December 15, 1907. Little has been written of his childhood, but it is clear that his early career was an undistinguished one. At the age of twenty-three, after completing Barnabitas College, he entered the National School of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro to study architecture. In 1928 he married Annita Baldo. While still a student, he insisted upon joining the office of Lúcio Costa, a well-known architect and city planner. Niemeyer continued in Costa’s office after completing his architectural studies at the Escola de Belas Artes in 1934, but his work drew little notice prior to 1936.

In 1936 a dramatic transformation occurred in Niemeyer’s career. He joined a group under Costa’s direction that had been formed to design a new building for the Brazilian Ministry of Education and Health (MEH). When the group submitted its design in May 1936, Costa suggested that the well-known French architect Le Corbusier be invited to Brazil to evaluate the design. Le Corbusier stayed for nearly a month, working in close cooperation with Costa’s group. During that time he had a profound impact on Niemeyer and the other architects in the group. Many consider his 1936 visit to Brazil to be the launching point for modern architecture in that country.

In 1939, after Costa left the design group, the remaining architects elected Niemeyer to take Costa’s place as head of the group. This sign of acclaim, in addition to several projects that Niemeyer had undertaken on his own, signaled the start of a promising career—a career that was to afford Niemeyer unusual opportunities for developing and expressing his creativity. That same year he helped design the Brazilian pavilion at the New York World’s Fair, a work that so impressed officials that New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia presented him with the keys to the city. His reputation began to spread far beyond Brazil.

Life’s Work

The first project of Niemeyer actually to be built was a maternity clinic and day nursery he designed for a philanthropic institution known as Obra de Berco. The design problem was complicated by the need to accommodate a number of diverse functions medical care, staff areas, nursery, but Niemeyer handled the problem in a way that reflected the modest means of the Obra de Berco while maintaining a friendly, almost anti-institutional atmosphere. On the northern side of the building, Niemeyer put vertical louvers on the outside of the building as protection from the sun. Several years after completion of the building, Niemeyer found that the louvers were not working as designed, so he replaced them at his own expense.

Niemeyer remained involved with the MEH building project through its completion in 1943. The design team finally adopted a variation of a plan proposed by Le Corbusier, and it proved quite successful. The building drew worldwide attention as the first public building to embody the concepts of the modern architecture movement. The design team, sensing that this building was to be a proving ground for modern architecture in Brazil, spent many years perfecting the design, and it is generally conceded that they were successful.

After completing the MEH building, Niemeyer began to experiment with different forms more widely. He began to break out on his own, away from what had by then become the conventional “new” architecture. Rather than striving for austere and highly rational designs, Niemeyer became more preoccupied with aesthetics. The first example of his new direction comes from a group of buildings that he built on the shores of Lake Pampulha: a casino, a yacht club, a restaurant, and a church. In these buildings, Niemeyer continued to use plastic and undulating forms but, in a major departure, not always for functional elements. His use of contrasting room heights, floating ramps, and a variety of means for modulating light all indicated his break from the functionalism and rationalism of the natural sciences. After these designs formed part of the Brazil Builds exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1943, they attracted international plaudits, and Brazilian architectural modernism became widely admired.

The church at Lake Pampulha, named for Saint Francis of Assisi, was both the most striking and the most controversial building of the group. Niemeyer chose paraboloid vaults as the main structural elements of the church. By thus creating walls and ceiling with one continuous structural component, he created both a unified and an economical structure. Although criticized roundly by some observers, Niemeyer refused to be inhibited. The Church of Saint Francis of Assisi is quite in keeping with his style of this period.

Niemeyer’s commissions increased after World War II, and with them his fame. The Boavista Bank building marked his return to downtown Rio de Janeiro and clearly illustrates the influence of Le Corbusier (in the cubism of the building’s exterior) as well as the freely curving forms of Brazilian architecture. One striking feature of the building in which many elements of Niemeyer’s style come together is a two-story, undulating wall of glass blocks. This wall forms the backdrop for the main banking floor and is stunning in its structural and visual effect.

By 1950, Niemeyer had firmly established himself as one of the world’s premier architects. By the middle of the decade, he had more than sixty commissions on the drawing board at one time. Some of his projects dating from this period include the United Nations Building in New York (he was a member of an international team of architects), the Hospital Sul America in Rio de Janeiro, the Aeronautical Training Center in São José dos Campos, and the Museum of Modern Art in Caracas, Venezuela. In September 1956, Niemeyer embarked on perhaps the largest and most important project of his career: creating a new capital city for Brazil.

In 1955, Juscelino Kubitschek had been elected president of Brazil, and he quickly set out to accomplish a number of reforms. One of those reforms was to be the relocation of Brazil’s capital to the interior of the country. This new capital was to be built from scratch and was to be called Brasília. Kubitschek and Niemeyer had formed a close relationship years earlier, and so Kubitschek came to his architect friend for help in this massive undertaking. By 1957, Niemeyer had been appointed chief architect for a new capital urbanization agency, NOVACAP (Companhia Urbanizadora da Nova Capital). In that capacity, he was responsible for the design of all the major federal buildings. With the help of Costa and sixty young architects, Niemeyer completed the final drawings in only two years. Construction also proceeded at a hectic pace, and on April 21, 1960, Brasília became the capital city of Brazil. In 1987, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) named Brasília a world heritage site.

The scale of the project is hard to imagine: to design and build a city and government center with an initial population of a half-million residents. Laid out on Costa’s plan based on the form of a curved cross, the city was intended to be a fully working metropolis from the start. Niemeyer was directly involved in all the major projects, including the congress buildings, the supreme court and presidential offices, the Cathedral and Chapel of Our Lady of Fatima, the presidential residence (Alvorada Palace), the foreign office, the Brasília Palace Hotel, and the National Theater.

Brasília did not come cheap, however, and the city took a political toll on Niemeyer’s patron, President Kubitschek, who decided against seeking reelection in the October 1960 election. For his achievement, Niemeyer was made head of the college of architecture at the University of Brasília. Not long afterward, he was injured in an automobile accident. After a lengthy recovery, he continued his work around the world, for instance, planning the campus of the University of Haifa in Israel.

Niemeyer returned to a much-altered Brazil in 1964. A coup by General Castello Branco had instituted a military dictatorship. In 1945, Niemeyer had joined the Communist Party in Brazil, an expression of his lifelong desire to promote a more egalitarian society. This affiliation cost him a great deal. The government rifled his offices and drove away clients. Finding work increasingly difficult, he moved to Paris in 1966. Opening an office in the city center, he worked on projects in France, Algeria, Madeira, and Malaysia. He became close friends of such leading French intellectuals as Jean-Paul Sartre and André Malraux.

As Brazil’s dictatorship gradually evolved into democracy during the early 1980s, Niemeyer returned home. He taught at the University of Rio de Janeiro and resumed his private practice. Among a host of projects, he designed the Memorial Juscelino Kubitschek in 1980, the Pantheon in 1985, and the Latin American Memorial in 1987. During the 1990s he produced the Memorial dos Povos Indigens (memorial for native people), the Catedral Militar, and the Niterói Contemporary Art Museum, an exotic design that many critics believe to be among his best. Into his nineties, Niemeyer persevered in his work; for instance, he helped to design the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London in 2003, the Oscar Niemeyer Museum in the city of Curitiba in 2002, a memorial tombstone to the slain revolutionary Carlos Marighella in 2004, and a building for the arts and sciences in João Pessoa in 2005. The president of Angola even asked him to participate in designing a new capital city for that nation, to be even larger than Brasília.

Throughout his long career, Niemeyer received numerous prestigious honors. In 1963, Niemeyer was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize by the Soviet Union. He shared the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 1988 with American architect Gordon Bunshaft. Japan gave him its Praemium Imperiale Award for his international influence on the arts. To commemorate his one-hundredth birthday in December 2007, Rio de Janeiro’s Paço Imperial hosted Oscar Niemeyer 10/100, a retrospective exhibition of his projects since 1996. In 2004, his wife of seventy-six years, Annita, died. Together, they had one daughter, Anna Maria. In 2006 Niemeyer married his longtime assistant, Vera Lúcia Cabreira, at his home in Rio de Janeiro. On December 5, 2012, Niemeyer died at the age of 104 in Rio de Janeiro.

Significance

Niemeyer and other Brazilian architects were influenced by Le Corbusier, but they built upon that foundation to establish a clearly Brazilian style of architecture—one held in high esteem in international architectural schools. Niemeyer found new, highly imaginative (hence, not strictly rational) uses for freely curving architectural forms. He also took conventions of the modern style, such as lifting buildings off the ground, and gave them his own form, as seen in the stylistic V-shaped stilts he often used.

Another important aspect of Niemeyer’s work was his ability to adapt his buildings to the climatic, physical, and economic setting of Brazil. He used brise soleil, or sun breakers, in a variety of ways that enhanced both a building’s appearance and the comfort of its occupants. Such a solution not only was more economical than air conditioning, it also served as a minimum barrier between the indoors and the outdoors. Breezes were channeled through Niemeyer's buildings to create a more comfortable environment.

Niemeyer did not neglect Brazil’s history in his designs. Many observers see a baroque influence from Brazil’s colonial period. Furthermore, Niemeyer capitalized upon a suggestion by Le Corbusier to use the traditional Portuguese-Spanish blue ceramic tile called azulejo (normally associated only with colonial-era buildings) as a finishing material. Niemeyer used azulejo tiles extensively, and on some buildings, notably the Church of Saint Francis of Assisi, created striking murals. As the citation for his Pritzker Prize put it, "His building designs are the distillation of colors, light and sensual imagery of his native land. . . . His pursuit of great architecture linked to roots of his native land has resulted in new plastic forms and a lyricism in buildings, not only in Brazil, but around the world."

Bibliography

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Hess, Alan, and Alan Weintraub. Oscar Niemeyer: Houses. New York: Rizzoli, 2006. Print.

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Mindlin, Henrique E. Modern Architecture in Brazil. New York: Reinhold, 1956. Print.

Niemeyer, Oscar. The Curves of Time: The Memoirs of Oscar Niemeyer. London: Phaidon, 2000. Print.

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Niemeyer, Oscar. Oscar Niemeyer: Works in Progress. Ed. Stamo Papadaki. New York: Reinhold, 1956. Print.

Niemeyer, Oscar. The Work of Oscar Niemeyer. Ed. Stamo Papadaki. New York: Reinhold, 1950. Print.

Papadaki, Stamo. Oscar Niemeyer. New York: George Braziller, 1960. Print.

Ouroussoff, Nicolai. "Oscar Niemeyer, Architect Who Gave Brasília Its Flair, Dies at 104." New York Times. New York Times, 5 Dec. 2012. Web. 18 Dec. 2013.

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Wainwright, Oliver. "Oscar Niemeyer: Architects and Critics Pay Tribute." Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 7 Dec. 2012. Web. 18 Dec. 2013.