Niemeyer curved Brasília into a capital of concrete
Oscar Niemeyer, 15 December 1907 to 5 December 2012, designed Brasília's civic core and helped shape the United Nations headquarters in New York. Over seventy-eight years and roughly six hundred projects he chased sensual curves in reinforced concrete, fled a 1964 coup for Paris, and took the Pritzker Prize in 1988.
Born in Rio and trained at the National School of Fine Arts, he married Annita Baldo at 21 and then worked unpaid as a draftsman for Lúcio Costa's studio, where even Le Corbusier later praised his perspectives. He talked his way onto Costa's team for the Ministry of Education and Health, completed in 1943 as the world's first state-sponsored modernist skyscraper, with Le Corbusier consulting. With Costa he also designed Brazil's light, curving pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair, which earned him the keys to the city from Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. Juscelino Kubitschek, then mayor of Belo Horizonte, commissioned the Pampulha complex, whose Church of Saint Francis of Assisi drew international attention.
When Kubitschek became president in 1956 he summoned Niemeyer to design Brasília's National Congress, cathedral, Alvorada and Planalto palaces and Supreme Federal Court, all by 1960 and linked by shared formal elements. The Copan building in São Paulo and his work with Le Corbusier on the United Nations headquarters brought invitations to teach at Yale and Harvard. Left-wing politics and Communist Party ties drove him abroad after the 1964 coup; he opened a Paris office, spent time in Cuba and the Soviet Union, returned in 1985, and led the party from 1992 to 1996.
He kept working into his nineties, opening the Niterói Contemporary Art Museum in 1996 and the Oscar Niemeyer Museum in 2002. He wrote that straight lines felt hard and man-made beside the curves of Brazil's mountains, rivers and waves, and supporters and critics alike called him a sculptor of monuments. Winner of the Pritzker Prize in 1988, he completed about 600 projects over 78 years and died in Rio in 2012 at 104.
Source: Oscar Niemeyer
