Oscar Niemeyer

Oscar Niemeyer designed the public buildings of a capital raised on empty savannah in forty-one months, and went on working until he was a hundred and four. He was born in Rio de Janeiro, trained at the National School of Fine Arts, and joined the office of Lucio Costa, where in 1936 he worked on the Ministry of Education and Health with Le Corbusier as consultant - the building that introduced modernism to Brazil and made his name at twenty-nine. Juscelino Kubitschek, then mayor of Belo Horizonte, commissioned the Pampulha complex from him in 1940; the church there was refused consecration for years because the clergy thought its parabolic vaults unfit for worship. When Kubitschek became president and decided to build Brasilia, Costa won the competition for the plan and Niemeyer designed the buildings: the twin towers and bowls of the National Congress, the crown of thorns of the cathedral, the columns of the Alvorada Palace. He wrote that he was not drawn to the right angle but to the free, sensual curve, the curve of mountains and of the body of a woman. He was a lifelong communist, joined the party in 1945, and left for Paris after the 1964 coup, working from an office on the Champs-Elysees and designing the French Communist Party headquarters and buildings in Algeria and Italy. He returned in 1985. He won the Pritzker Prize in 1988. He designed over six hundred buildings, was still producing drawings in his hundreds, and died a few days before his hundred and fifth birthday. He designed the United Nations headquarters in New York on the international team of 1947, alongside Le Corbusier, who claimed the result as his own. He kept a studio on Copacabana beach with a window on the sea. He was refused a United States visa during the McCarthy years, which cost him a teaching post at Harvard.

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