Art: The Architect of Brasilia

Two years ago a brilliant Brazilian architect took on one of the world’s most exciting assignments in art: to design the palaces, public buildings, courthouses, churches—even the yacht club—of a whole new city that will house 500,000 people. Now Brasilia, the great new inland national capital, is bustling toward completion, much to the pride and satisfaction of Architect Oscar Niemeyer.

In a country alive with spectacular and imaginative new architecture, the work of Oscar Niemeyer (see color pages) ranks at the top. One day in 1956 Niemeyer went riding with his longtime friend, President Juscelino Kubitschek, who told him his dream of Brasilia and casually added: “I want you to design it.” Niemeyer has since turned down a fortune in fees to become the $300-a-month head of the Department of Architecture and Urbanization of Novacap (a coined word meaning “new capital”) Last week, with Kubitschek already installed in the nearly finished Palace of the Dawn, Architect Niemeyer moved wife, draftsmen and baggage to Brasilia to live there and carry on the job.

Driving Dreamer. He left behind the comfort of a house south of Rio that is itself an architectural showplace, with curves flowing gracefully into the hills above the Atlantic. But in translating Kubitschek’s dream into Brasilia’s buildings, Niemeyer, once an easygoing bohemian, turned into a single-minded driver. Says he: “Until Brasilia, I regarded architecture as an exercise to be practiced in a sporting spirit and nothing more. Now I live for Brasilia.”

Oscar Niemeyer, 50, is a dreamer, shy but self-assured about his art. He hates to be alone, yet is rarely at ease in society.

He dislikes earning juicy fees for buildings that he deems antisocial or commercial. Like Le Corbusier, Picasso and many another artist, he calls himself a Communist, did not switch even after Hungary, because “we are too old to change.” But he insists that he limits his Communist activity to donations to the party, prefers novels (favorite: Jean-Paul Sartre) to Marx, takes little interest in politics, and remains a close friend of anti-Red President Kubitschek.

Lazy Youth. As an architect, Niemeyer was a late starter. He barely squeaked through high school, then drifted (“I just liked to draw”) until he was 19. One day he dropped his shyness long enough to go right up to a pretty girl in the street and ask for a date. Recalls his wife, Ana Lisa: “I was waiting for a trolley. It was really all a surprise.” The fact that his future father-in-law was a contractor gave Niemeyer the idea of entering architecture school, but he did not have the necessary credits. So, he says, “I played soccer, went fishing and swimming, learned jujitsu.” At 22, with daughter Ana Maria about to be born, he got admitted to Rio’s Escola de Bellas Artes, dropped out a couple of times, managed to end up with a degree. Then he went to work for the man who did most to get Brazil’s great modern architecture movement into full swing—Lúcio Costa.

Commissioned in 1936 to design a building for Brazil’s Ministry of Education, Architect Costa summoned Le Corbusier from France, surrounded “the greatest man in modern architecture” with a group of students who have since become Brazil’s best. Among them: Afonso (Museum of Modern Art) Reidy, Jorge (University City) Moreira, Niemeyer. Then Costa pulled out of the project after a series of disagreements. The others elected Novice Niemeyer as their leader, and their building, faced with blue, louver-like sun-breakers, became a famed architectural milestone.

Niemeyer’s first major project of his own was commissioned by the man who was then mayor of Belo Horizonte, Juscelino Kubitschek. The project: Pampulha, a new suburb for Belo Horizonte (pop. 600,000). Says Niemeyer: “Juscelino was a perfect client. He told me what he wanted and gave me complete artistic liberty to carry it out.” Projecting Le Corbusier’s ideas, Niemeyer combined respect for Brazil’s climate, terrain and Latin tempo with his own love for the freeflow form. The curving, tiled lines of the restaurant, the soaring yacht club and casino, the many-arched Church of St. Francis were more sinuous and sensuous than any of the master’s projects. “For five years after Le Corbusier’s visit we followed him faithfully,” said Niemeyer. “It was with Pampulha that we began to act more freely and Brazilian architecture began to develop on its own.”

Busy Maturity. Since Pampulha, Niemeyer has designed monuments and museums, schools and service stations, weekend cottages and water towers, arenas and airports, apartment houses and factories. In scale he ranges from Brasilia’s tiny Dom Bosco roadside shrine to the huge Quintadinha project for Petropolis: a vast, curved apartment house 33 stories high and 1,380 ft. long, designed to house 5,700 families. With Costa he sketched the 1939 New York World’s Fair Brazilian Pavilion. He became Brazil’s delegate to the U.N.’s architectural board, designed a sector of West Berlin and a suburb of Havana.

Perhaps too facile, he has whisked off a skyscraper design overnight, took only 15 days to plan Caracas’ Museum of Modern Art, a pyramid that will rest upside down atop Bello Monte mountain. “I study the problem, the arc of the sun, the lay of the land,” he said. “Then I mull over it for a couple of days. Finally the idea comes.” One result of such fast work: dwellers sometimes complain about the lack of closets or kitchen windows in Niemeyer houses; builders sweat over specifications that often make light of construction problems. At Brasilia the builder of the Palace of the Dawn reported that each V-shaped pillar “took two weeks to frame and pour, another two weeks to face with small stone squares as specified.” But, he added: “It turned out very pretty.”

President Kubitschek wanted Niemeyer to design Brasilia alone. But Niemeyer staged a public competition for the pilot plan, was jubilant when the winning entry—a city plan that from above looks like an airplane—was submitted by his old teacher, Lucio Costa. Said his former pupil: “Costa set high standards and we will keep to them.”

At Brasilia Niemeyer must still design theaters, stations, airport buildings, must approve every private venture, find materials, supervise all projects. For the city’s 3,000-seat cathedral, he plans a tepee of concrete poles 220 ft. high, sheathed in translucent plastic and stained glass. “Brasilia,” says Niemeyer, “begins a new phase in my work, more geometrical, more simple, more monumental.” Post-Brasilia outlook: “I have not thought about it. I suppose I will have to start my life all over again.”