Happy century, dear Oscar
By Edwin Heathcote
Published: December 14 2007 17:40 F.T.com
The man of whom Fidel Castro said: “Oscar Niemeyer and I are the last communists on this planet” celebrates his 100th birthday today.
Niemeyer, the charismatic architect of Brasilia, is a great survivor, perhaps the greatest architect alive. When I visited his Rio de Janeiro studio overlooking the beach, he told me he had lasted so well because “other architects look to the right angle and the straight line, I always design with the mountains of Rio in my eyes. Mine is an architecture of curves, the body of a woman, the sinuous rivers, the waves of the sea.”
As he spoke, he sketched. I expected an exotic building to emerge from the lines; instead I got the flowing outline of a reclining nude.
The wizened old man, sucking on a big cigar probably sent to him by his friend Castro, was one of the first superstar architects. He is keenly aware of his stature and has long lived his own legend. He speaks in strangely familiar quotes that you know have done the rounds, yet are delivered with charisma and charm.
Niemeyer, born in Rio on December 15, 1907, was already a respected architect when Brazil’s President Juscelino Kubitschek was searching for a new capital to supplant the colonial cities and a new image for the nation. It was also a time when Brazilian architects latched on to the modernism of Europe and ran with it, often surpassing it.
From his Brazilian Pavilion at New York’s 1939 World’s Fair and the undulating reinforced concrete roof of his church in Pampulha to his collaboration with Le Corbusier on the United Nations Building in New York, Niemeyer had pioneered a modernism less obsessed with functionalism than its European counterpart. His was an architecture concerned more with expressive form, fluidity and structural acrobatics than with asceticism and restraint.
It was also lyrical and uplifting in a way rarely achieved by Bauhaus buildings, with their clinical efficiency. His biggest moment, however, came with his friendship with Kubitschek, who commissioned him in the 1950s to create Brasilia’s gorgeous government buildings and crowning cathedral.
He suffered a painful period beginning only a year after the inauguration of Brasilia in 1960 when the military staged a coup that left the dedicated communist architect a marginal figure. In 1965, he moved to Paris, where his best-known building from this period remains the HQ for the French Communist party, centred on its sparkling domed hall.
When the dictatorship fell in the 1980s, he returned to his beloved Rio, and instead of sinking into a deserved retirement he embarked on a wave of ambitious and radical buildings. Among these is the extraordinary art gallery at Niteroi, near Rio: a flying saucer volume with curving walls and a continuous strip window against which hanging is impossible and lighting dreadful. Yet it is also one of the most genuinely affecting structures I have experienced.
Last year saw the opening of two more Niemeyer structures in Brasilia and, at the age of 98, he also got married again (his bride was 90).
Niemeyer has passed in and out of fashion but has inspired contemporary architects from Zaha Hadid to Rem Koolhaas with his daring quest for an extravagant but humane beauty.
“Architecture,” Niemeyer told me in his 1930s studio overlooking Ipanema beach, “is not really important. Life is what is important. And it goes by so fast.”
Not that fast, Oscar. Happy Birthday.
