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Oscar Niemeyer was born Oscar Ribeiro de Almeida Niemeyer Soares Filho on December 15, 1907, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He grew up in a wealthy family without any aspirations toward being an architect, though he started drawing at an early age. "When I was very little," he later recalled, "my mother said I used to draw in the air with my fingers. I needed a pencil. Once I could hold one, I have drawn every day since."
As a young man, Niemeyer worked for his father at a typography house for a short while before entering the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes, from which he graduated in 1934. Shortly before graduation, he joined the offices of Lúcio Costa, an architect from the Modernist school.
Niemeyer worked with Costa on many major buildings between 1936 and 1943, including the design for Brazil's Ministry of Education and Health building, which was part of a collaboration with Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier. Costa and Niemeyer also worked together on Brazil's iconic pavilion in the 1939 New York World's Fair; legendary Mayor Fiorello La Guardia was so impressed with Niemeyer's design that he declared him an honorary citizen of New York.
In 1941, Niemeyer launched his solo career by designing a series of buildings called the Pampulha Architectural Complex in the city of Belo Horizonte. Here, Niemeyer started developing some of his design trademarks, including the heavy use of concrete and a propensity toward curves.
Niemeyer's status as a rising star in the architectural world was confirmed when he was chosen to represent Brazil as part of the team to design the new headquarters of the United Nations in New York City; the final building was based primarily on Niemeyer's design, with significant elements also taken from his old collaborator, Corbusier. Following the completion of the United Nations building in 1953, Niemeyer won an appointment as dean of Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, but he was refused an American work visa by the United States government due to his membership in Brazil's Communist Party.
In 1956, Juscelino Kubitschek, the president of Brazil and a close friend of Niemeyer, came to the architect with a proposal, asking Niemeyer to become the new chief architect of public buildings in the country's new capital, Brasilia, a Modernist civic metropolis being built from scratch in the interior of the country. Niemeyer eagerly accepted, designing buildings that went along with his utopian vision of government.
He designed several buildings in Brasilia, including the presidential palace, the Brasília Palace Hotel, the Ministry of Justice building, the presidential chapel and the cathedral. After the inauguration of the new capital city in 1960, Niemeyer resigned from his position as the government's chief architect and returned to private practice.
Niemeyer had become interested in Communist ideology as a youth and joined the Brazilian Communist Party in 1945. This became a serious problem in 1964, when the Brazilian military overthrew the government in a coup; Niemeyer, viewed by the army as an individual with dangerously left-wing sympathies, had his office ransacked. Spooked, the architect left the country of his birth a year later, in 1965, resettling in France and mainly designing buildings in Europe and northern Africa. He also turned to designing furniture, which also included his trademark use of sinuous curves. Niemeyer did not return to Brazil until the end of the military dictatorship in 1985.
Semi-retired since the mid-1980s, at the age of 103 Oscar Niemeyer still went into his office every day to work on designs and oversee projects. Having outlived most of his old friends, intellectual sparring partners and his wife of 60 years—though he remarried in 2006, to his longtime assistant Vera Lucia Cabreira—Niemeyer continued to press for a better world through better design. "It is important," he once said, "that the architect think not only of architecture but of how architecture can solve the problems of the world. The architect's role is to fight for a better world, where he can produce an architecture that serves everyone and not just a group of privileged people."
Niemeyer died in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on December 5, 2012. He was 104 years old. A funeral service was held in Brasilia, at the presidential palace he designed more than 50 years earlier.
Niemeyer was best known for his design of civic buildings for Brasília, a planned city that became Brazil's capital in 1960, as well as his collaboration with other architects on the headquarters of the United Nations in New York. His exploration of the aesthetic possibilities of reinforced concrete was highly influential in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Since 1984 the Rio de Janeiro carnival parade is held in the Sambadrome designed by Oscar Niemeyer. In 2003 the Unidos de Vila Isabel Samba School celebrated the life of Niemeyer in their carnival parade. It was the first time that Vila Isabel paid tribute to a living historical figure. The parade's theme song – O Arquiteto no Recanto da Princesa – was composed by the Brazilian singer Martinho da Vila.
Oscar Niemeyer's projects have also been a major source of inspiration for the French painter Jacques Benoit. In 2006 Benoit presented in Paris a series of paintings entitled Three Traces of Oscar, paying tribute to the legacy of Niemeyer in France. In 2010 the Brasilia Jubilee Commission chose Benoit's works for an exhibition that celebrated the 50th anniversary of the city. The exhibition – Brasilia. Flesh and Soul – displayed 27 canvas divided into three series, all of them inspired by the architectural landscape of Brasilia and the history of its construction.
Niemeyer is featured in the film Urbanized discussing his design process and architectural philosophy.
During the homage to Oscar Niemeyer on December 15, 2012 (it would have been his 105th birthday), the citizens movement released "Sentimiento Niemeyer" at the Centro Niemeyer in Spain. The verses were written by different people through a Facebook event and put together by musicians. The song was released under a Creative Commons license (attribution, non-profit, no-variations) so that other artists who shared the feeling around the world could make their own cover of the song, keeping the melody and translating the lyrics.
In July 2015 the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MoT) organized the first major retrospective of Niemeyer in Japan, curated by Yuko Hasegawa in collaboration with Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa from SANAA.
Niemeyer was a lifelong atheist, basing his beliefs both on the "injustices of this world" and on cosmological principles: "It's a fantastic Universe which humiliates us, and we can't make any use of it. "
In 1956, Niemeyer was invited by Brazil's new president, Juscelino Kubitschek, to design the civic buildings for Brazil's new capital, which was to be built in the center of the country, far from any existing cities. His designs for the National Congress of Brazil, the Cathedral of Brasília, the Palácio da Alvorada, the Palácio do Planalto, and the Supreme Federal Court, all designed by 1960, were experimental and linked by common design elements.
This work led to his appointment as inaugural head of architecture at the University of Brasília, as well as honorary membership of the American Institute of Architects. Due to his largely leftist ideology, and involvement with the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), Niemeyer left the country after the 1964 military coup and opened an office in Paris. He opened an office on the Champs-Élysées and found customers in diverse countries, especially in Algeria where he designed the University of Science and Technology-Houari Boumediene. In Paris he created the headquarters of the French Communist Party. From 1992 to 1996, Niemeyer was the president of the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB).
Offering an alternative to the strict rectangles of the International style, he frequently worked with organic shapes and is often credited with introducing sensuality into modernist architecture.
Quotations:
"My architecture followed the old examples—beauty prevailing over the limitations of the constructive logic. My work proceeded, indifferent to the
unavoidable criticism set forth by those who take the trouble to examine the minimum details, so very true of what mediocrity is capable of. It was enough to think of Le
Corbusier saying to me once while standing on the ramp of the Congress: 'There is invention here.'"
"I consciously ignored the highly praised right angle and the rational architecture of T-squares and triangles," he said, "in order to wholeheartedly enter the world of curves and new shapes made possible by the introduction of concrete into the building process."
He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1949), Honorary Member of the American Institute of Architects (1963), Honorary Member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters (USA, 1964) and an Honorary Member of the Academy of Arts of the USSR (1983).
Quotes from others about the person
The BBC's obituary of Niemeyer said that he "built some of the world's most striking buildings – monumental, curving concrete and glass structures which almost defy description", describing him as "one of the most innovative and daring architects of the last 60 years."
The Washington Post said he was "widely regarded as the foremost Latin American architect of the last century."
In 1928, at age 21, Niemeyer left school (Santo Antonio Maria Zaccaria priory school) and married Annita Baldo, daughter of Italian immigrants from Padua.
They had one daughter, Anna Maria, in 1930 (she predeceased her father on June 6, 2012).
Niemeyer subsequently had five grandchildren, thirteen great-grandchildren, and seven great-great-grandchildren. Annita died in 2004, at 93, after 76 years of marriage.
In 2006, shortly before his 99th birthday, Niemeyer married for the second time, to his longtime secretary, Vera Lucia Cabreira at his apartment, a month after he had fractured his hip in a fall.
