Centenary years are a common excuse to celebrate an artist’s work. Centenary celebrations honouring artists who are still alive - and professionally active - are much rarer.
Brazil’s most famous architect, Oscar Niemeyer, will turn 100 in December. This has already been a busy year for him, with commemorative exhibitions opening throughout the country and homage being paid from all quarters of public life. After recovering from surgery following a fall late last year, he is not shying away from public attention.
Born in Rio de Janeiro, Niemeyer’s prominence rests on his spectacular attempts to tropicalise the modernist ideals embodied by architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier. His native city’s hilly landscape and female denizens are said to have inspired a love of meandering lines. As he wrote in a poem:
It is not the right angle that attracts me,
Nor the hard, inflexible straight line, man-made.
What attracts me are free and sensual curves.
The curves in my country’s mountains,
In the sinuous flow of its rivers,
In the beloved woman’s body.
In practice, this has produced stunningly sculptural buildings that reveal a commitment to plasticity over function.
Niemeyer shot to fame when he and fellow architect Lucio Costa erected Brazil’s pavilion at New York’s 1939 World Fair. The following year Juscelino Kubitschek, mayor of the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte, asked him to design a building complex around a reservoir in the suburb of Pampulha. The project included a church, yacht club, casino and dance hall. It turned out to be a crucial commission. When Kubitschek became president in 1956 and envisioned a new inland capital for the country - Brasilia - he asked Costa to plan it and Niemeyer to build it.
The Pampulha complex was fundamental for another reason: it was the first of Niemeyer’s large-scale projects to employ reinforced concrete in free, unsupported curves - a signature of most of his buildings since. At the time, the church of Sao Francisco de Assis, with its undulating vaulted roof, pushed the boundaries of engineering and material usage. It remains (after recent restoration) one of Niemeyer’s most iconic and graceful works.
Bigger commissions followed, both at home and abroad. Then came that rarest of opportunities: an invitation to create from scratch, almost single-handedly, a new capital. Inaugurated in 1960, Niemeyer’s Brasilia is a bold essay in the use of volume and space. His National Congress mixes domed and saucer-shaped structures with a vertical tower block. The foreign ministry seems to levitate over water. Snaking ramps and tapering columns give the monumental edifices, including a cathedral and the presidential palace, an unexpected weightlessness.
Age has not slowed him down. In the past few months alone, Niemeyer has completed, or unveiled plans for, projects in Brazil, France, Spain and Cuba. One of his latest - a monument in Caracas, Venezuela, to honour the nation’s liberator Simon Bolivar - was commissioned recently by Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. ”I’m as busy as anyone else,” Niemeyer tells me when we finally meet in his Rio de Janeiro studio. ”I like working. To spend time on a project is no sacrifice.”
Niemeyer keeps himself busy in the penthouse of a 10-storey art-deco building, once known as ”The Mae West” due to its voluptuously curved bay windows. The view from inside the studio is breathtaking: Sugar Loaf Mountain, on the far left; Copacabana Fort, on the far right; and Copacabana beach connecting them like a sun-kissed necklace.
I had arranged an interview through Vera, Niemeyer’s long-time secretary and now (as of November) second wife. I arrive on time, and an assistant asks me to wait: the architect is in a meeting. A male nurse sits in one of the two alcoves overlooking the seafront. Curled up floor plans are piled on a Niemeyer-designed chaise longue. A sleek rocking chair, also designed by him, looks tempting, but too beautiful, to sit on.
There is plenty of time to admire the line drawings scrawled on the waiting area’s walls - sketches of his most famous buildings and female nudes. I ask the nurse about Niemeyer’s health. ”Good for someone his age,” he tells me. I notice a filing cabinet with shallow drawers marked ”Drawings for political work” and ”Drawings of women”.
Laughter emanates from the architect’s inner sanctum. Out comes Canadian rock idol Bryan Adams, who is in town for a concert and has stopped by to pay his respects to Brazil’s living treasure. I continue to wait as other visitors with more pressing business rush in to see Niemeyer ahead of me. A woman explains, apologetically, that she had just arrived from Cuba with urgent news from Fidel and Raul Castro - Niemeyer recently designed a statue to be unveiled near Havana’s airport, a gift for Fidel’s 80th birthday.
More than an hour after the appointed time, I am ushered into the architect’s small, book-lined office. He is slumped in his chair, unshaven and looking rather frail. He seems annoyed by my presence. A cigarette smoulders in an ashtray. ”You’re late,” he says, ”I’m too busy for interviews.” I remonstrate. He concedes: ”As long as it doesn’t take you more than 15 minutes.” Idle conversation is out of the question. ”You are almost 100 years old,” I begin, stating the obvious. He interrupts, tersely: ”Voce e uma merda.”
To be called a shit so soon into the interview does not bode well for the remainder of my 15 minutes. What I wanted to say, I explain, was that in nearly a century of life and 70 years of work, he must have achieved things he was proud of. ”No, I’m a human being like any other. I worked. I lived. I had fun. I’ll be gone. That’s it. There’s nothing special about me.”
Surely there are works of his that have caused him some satisfaction? Maybe Pampulha, he replies, since it became a precedent for the construction of the new capital. ”Brasilia marked a period of optimism in the country,” he says wistfully. ”To see a city built so dramatically gave Brazilians a sense of renewed confidence.”
He remains determinedly self-effacing about his own role. ”I had some good opportunities. I was lucky to have had the chance to do things differently. Architecture is about surprise.”
Niemeyer’s ambition to surprise remains undiminished in his recent work. ”Oscar Niemeyer 10/100”, a retrospective exhibition on show at Rio de Janeiro’s Paco Imperial, focuses on 40 projects completed between 1996 and 2006. There are models and sketches of his spaceship-like contemporary art museum in Niteroi (1996), of the new auditorium for Sao Paulo’s Ibirapuera Park (1999), of his summer pavilion at London’s Serpentine Gallery (2003) and of Brasilia’s national library (2006). The soaring curves, winding ramps and gargantuan vaults are still there, though attention to detail is less evident - some critics have observed that Niemeyer’s latest works are poorly executed variations on previous efforts.
The exhibition also offers an overview of his early career, displaying models of highlights such as his collaboration with Le Corbusier on the United Nations headquarters in New York (1952), the communist party headquarters in Paris (1967), the exquisite Mondadori building outside Milan (1968), and the University of Constantine, in Algeria (1969). Alongside the strictly architectural work, a few of his sketches of female nudes are shown in public for the first time.
The common denominator of Niemeyer’s old and new projects is his consistent exploration of reinforced concrete’s versatility, his drive to create structures that seem lighter even as they become larger. ”My ambition has always been to reduce a building’s support to a minimum,” he reflects. ”The more we diminish supporting structures, the more audacious and important the architecture is. That has been my life’s work.” For that work he was awarded the 1988 Pritzker Prize.
Long a member of the communist party, Niemeyer is a vocal defender of left-wing governments in Brazil and abroad. His Bolivar monument, in Caracas, will be shaped like a lance pointing at the US. In an accompanying text to the Paco Imperial exhibition, he writes: ”Only in politics I am intransigent and radical - I am against Bush’s murderous empire, and against anyone who in this country opposes [president] Lula”.
Can politics and architecture mix? ”Architecture doesn’t matter,” Niemeyer tells me. ”Someone who is out on the streets protesting is doing a much more important job than I am. Politics matters. Changing the world matters because we live in a shit world.” What, I ask, can architecture do to change the world? Nothing, he replies.
Yet one of his current projects betrays an entrenched idealism - he has plans for a university designed to eradicate barriers between intellectual disciplines. ”To eliminate the specialist man”, he says solemnly, as if this worthy humanist ideal were not an ancient one.
There is a favourite phrase of Niemeyer’s. I have heard him say it at interviews, and read it in his books. Even as my 15 minutes run out, he is not prepared to let me go without reiterating it for my benefit: ”Life is more important than architecture.”
”Oscar Niemeyer 10/100: Producao Contemporanea 1996-2006” is on at Paco Imperial, Praca XV de Novembro 48, Rio de Janeiro, until April 29.
