Oscar Niemayer

Oscar Niemeyer

It really did seem as if Oscar Niemeyer would live forever. He died on Wednesday, 10 days short of his 105th birthday, his architectural career continuing quite literally to the end—he was still giving direction to employees about ongoing projects from his hospital bed in Rio in his final days. His commitment to the notion that modernism could make life richer, freer, more spirited, and more meaningful also remained fully intact. You could call Niemeyer the last of the true believers, but he was more than that: an extraordinary blend of passion, arrogance, and naivety, seasoned, I suspect, with more than a little craftiness.

His career began in the 1930s, when he worked with Lucio Costa, one of Brazil’s first modernists, and Le Corbusier on the design of the Brazilian Ministry of Education and Health in Rio, which was the first major modernist public building in Brazil. The ministry became a sign to the world that Brazil wanted to make itself a place of cutting-edge architecture, and very quickly Niemeyer began to establish his own style, more flowing and curvaceous than Le Corbusier’s or Costa’s, and so in sync with the image of Brazil that, looking back at his work, it is now difficult to say how much Niemeyer emerged out of an inherently Brazilian attitude toward design and how much his architecture itself created that attitude.

Niemeyer’s architecture of exuberance was all the more striking because his politics were so far away from the lush, indulgent world that his buildings suggest. He was a lifelong communist, with a serious commitment to left-wing politics far greater than that of any of his peers among the world’s major modernist architects, who often tend to be sanctimonious about design and pragmatic about politics. You could almost say that, for Niemeyer, it was the other way around: he kept his somber idealism for the political realm, his pleasure for architecture alone.

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