The Passing of a Modernist Master: A Tribute to Oscar Niemeyer

Oscar Niemeyer, the prolific architect who gave form to Brazil’s twentieth-century sociopolitical optimism, died this Wednesday at a Rio de Janeiro hospital. He was 104. When news of his passing was confirmed yesterday evening, the world seemed almost ready to hear it. Obituaries had been written, Niemeyer’s extraordinary life ripe for reflection now for some time. Yet his death, justifiably, still aroused a profound sense of disbelief. The last surviving architect in a line of legendary master builders — including the giant personalities of Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe — Niemeyer was, in more recent times, a living reminder of a bygone era, of a modern epoch charged with hope and moved to action.

A native of Rio de Janeiro, Niemeyer attended the National School of Fine Arts, where he drew the attention of its dean Lucio Costa, a spirited practitioner bent on bringing modernism to Brazil, in part, through architecture. Two years after graduating, Niemeyer was hired by Costa to serve as a project draftsman in the design of the Ministry of Education and Health headquarters, a prominent 1936 commission that led to Niemeyer’s first collaboration with the then-foremost innovator in the field: Le Corbusier.

Working under Costa and Le Corbusier, Niemeyer exhibited an early self-confidence, proposing changes that were successfully adopted in the final proposal. The resulting building is a masterful work of civic design: a rectilinear mass sequined with brise-soleil sunshades and propped upon a forest of stone pilottis, forming a sheltered space through which pedestrians can freely pass. The structure is rational from a distance yet, at the human scale, enriched with poetic flourishes, including vibrant, large-scale mosaics and sculptural staircases. These expressive details would reappear in Niemeyer’s independent commissions, which reflect the architect’s fundamental questioning of modernism’s aesthetic tenets.

Through Costa, Niemeyer was later introduced to Juscelino Kubitschek, a prominent politician whose patronage would truly launch the young architect’s career. As mayor of Belo Horizonte in the 1940’s, Kubitschek hired Niemeyer to design a complex of buildings, including a church, casino, and yacht club, just outside the city. For the Pampulha Complex, as it was called, Niemeyer followed his divergent intuitions about modernism with full force, subverting the supremacy of the right angle by experimenting with curves rendered in concrete: Gamboling parabolic lines boldly outline the space of the Church of Saint Francis of Assisi, while snaking concrete ribbons weave in and out of the Casa de Baile dance hall.

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