Brazil architecture - personified in Niemeyer
Oscar Niemeyer to Celebrate 100th Birthday Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer leaves lasting imprint on homeland Read original article here: Brazil architecture RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil—Working in his penthouse studio above the lazy curve of Copacabana Beach, architect Oscar Niemeyer has spent much of the last century redesigning his giant homeland. The Rio de Janeiro native has taken the sensual shapes of the sand and hills of this city and recast them—in schools, theaters and other creations that have risen all over Brazil. And his country has given back, turning him into a living legend and, arguably, the most celebrated Brazilian alive. Brazil architecture personified Yet Niemeyer, who is weeks away from his 99th birthday on Dec. 15, remains the modest, charming workaholic he has been throughout his career, which spans more than seven decades. Brazil architecture “I worked—there’s nothing special about it,” he said on a recent morning in his studio while puffing on a cigarette. “What pleases me is I worked but I didn’t work in architecture as if it would resolve the world’s problems. Architecture isn’t important—it’s important, certainly—but the most important thing is life.” That humility belies the enormous role Niemeyer has played in the history of his country and profession. No other architect enjoys as intimate a bond with a nation as Niemeyer does with Brazil. And few living architects are as acclaimed internationally. He’s perhaps best known for the layout of the U.N. headquarters in New York, but he’s responsible for 175 projects worldwide. In Brazil, his masterpiece is the country’s capital, Brasilia, which he dreamed up out of the red-dirt plains of central Brazil in the 1950s. In a handful of years, he drew up 83 public buildings for the new capital. But his influence is everywhere. Hundreds of prefabricated public schools are based on a design Niemeyer developed during the 1980s, and his imagination drove the construction of cathedrals, memorials, libraries, the stadium for Rio’s annual Carnaval parade, and even the slum house of his longtime driver. He works seven days a week in his sunny studio, starting regularly before 10 a.m. and finishing at dinner time. Niemeyer’s designs often celebrate what became his trademark, the curve, molded in reinforced concrete. It even served as the title of his 1998 memoir, “The Curves of Time,” in which he tells of long hours, between epic bouts of drinking and womanizing, debating politics and architecture with luminaries such as French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and Brazilian President Juscelino Kubitschek. One of his most popular buildings, the Museum of Contemporary Art in the city of Niteroi, across Guanabara Bay from Rio, is a giant, white disc seemingly floating above ocean waters. It was completed in 1996, when Niemeyer was 88. He’d won the Pritzker Architectural Prize, the top award in the field, eight years earlier.
And he hasn’t stopped. Niemeyer is finishing up two of the most ambitious projects of his career: a complex that includes a massive theater, churches and other buildings in Niteroi, and a national library and museum designed on a monumental scale in the heart of Brasilia.
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