Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer dead

Updated December 06, 2012 15:49:20

Renowned Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer has died at the age of 104.

Niemeyer, a towering patriarch of modern architecture who designed the main buildings of Brazil's futuristic capital, Brasilia, died on Wednesday.

He had been battling kidney ailments and pneumonia for nearly a month in a Rio de Janeiro hospital.

His death was confirmed by a hospital spokesperson.

Starting in the 1930s, Niemeyer's career spanned nine decades, leaving his stylistic imprint around the world with distinctive and often curvy space-age style.

He became a national icon, ranking alongside Bossa Nova pioneer Tom Jobim and soccer legend Pele.

His glass and white-concrete buildings include the United Nations Secretariat in New York, the Communist Party headquarters in Paris and Brasilia's Roman Catholic Cathedral.

He won the 1988 Pritzker Architecture Prize, considered the Nobel Prize of architecture, for the Brasilia cathedral.

Its "crown of thorns" cupola fills the church with light and a sense of soaring grandeur despite the fact that most of the building is underground.

The cathedral was one of dozens of public structures Niemeyer designed for Brazil's made-to-order capital, a city that helped define "space-age" style.



The collection of government buildings in Brasilia remains his most monumental and enduring achievement.

While the aeroplane-shaped city was planned and laid out by Niemeyer's friend Lucio Costa, the architect designed nearly every important government building in the city.


Initially influenced by the angular modernism of French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier, who worked with Niemeyer and Costa on a visit to Brazil in the 1930s, his style evolved toward rounded buildings which he said were inspired by the curves of Rio's sunbathing women, as well as beaches and verdant hills.

"That is the architecture I do, looking for new, different forms. Surprise is key in all art," Niemeyer said in 2006.


Responding to criticism that his work was impractical and overly artistic, Niemeyer dismissed the idea that a building's design should reflect its function as a "ridiculous and irritating" architectural dogma.

"Whatever you think of his buildings, Niemeyer has stamped on the world a Brazilian style of architecture," Dennis Sharp, a British architect and author of The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Architects and Architecture, said.

Lifelong communist

Niemeyer's legacy is heavily associated with his communist views. He was a close friend of Cuba's revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, and an enemy of Brazil's 21-year military dictatorship.


His architecture, though, regularly trumped his politics.

Georges Pompidou, a right-wing former French president, said Niemeyer's design for the Communist Party of France's headquarters "was the only good thing those commies ever did," according to the architect's memoirs.

Iconic fashion company Prada thought the Communist Party building in Paris so cool it rented it for a fashion show.

Niemeyer was exiled from Brazil in the 1960s, but remained politically active after his return.

He said in 2010 that he was a great admirer of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the former labour leader who was Brazil's president from 2003 to 2010.

Niemeyer once built a house in a Rio slum for his former driver, and gave apartments and offices as presents to others.



Planned for 500,000 people, the city is now home to more than 2.5 million, and VIPs keep to themselves in fenced-in villas while the poor live in distant satellite towns.



That work won the confidence of the city's mayor Juscelino Kubitschek.

When he became Brazil's president, he employed Niemeyer to help realise the dream of opening up Brazil's interior by moving the capital from coastal Rio to the empty plains of central Brazil.

Niemeyer remained married for 76 years to Annita Baldo, his first wife. He married his second wife, long-time aide Vera Lucia Cabreira, in 2006 at the age of 99. She survives him, as do four grandchildren.



Topics: architecture, death, brazil

First posted December 06, 2012 11:29:49