Oscar Niemeyer died last week.

[rug]

His passing should be noted.

Niemeyer had a leftist political ideology. In 1945, many communist militants who were arrested under Vargas' dictatorship were released, and Niemeyer, who at the time kept an office at Conde Lages (in Glória), decided to shelter some of them there. The experience allowed him to meet Luís Carlos Prestes, perhaps the most important leftist figure in Brazil. After several weeks, he gave up the house to Prestes and his supporters, who came to found the Brazilian Communist Party. Niemeyer then joined the Brazilian Communist Party in 1945 and went on to become its president in 1992. Niemeyer was a boy at the time of the Russian Revolution of 1917, and by the Second World War he had become a young idealist. During the military dictatorship of Brazil his office was raided and he was forced into exile in Europe. The Minister of Aeronautics of the time reportedly said that "the place for a communist architect is Moscow." He subsequently visited the Soviet Union, meeting with a number of the country's leaders, and in 1963 was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize. Niemeyer was also a close friend of Fidel Castro, who often visited his apartment and studio whilst in Brazil. Castro was once quoted as saying "Niemeyer and I are the last communists on this planet." Niemeyer was also regularly visited by Hugo Chávez.

Some critics have pointed out the fact that Niemeyer's architecture is often contradictory to this view. His first major work, Pampulha, had a bourgeois character, and Brasília was famous for its palaces. Niemeyer never saw architecture in the same way as Walter Gropius, who defended a rational and industrial architecture capable of moulding society into the new industrial era. Skeptical about architecture's ability to change the "unjust society", Niemeyer defended that such activism should be undertaken politically, and thus simplifying architecture for such purposes would be anti-modern (as it would be limiting constructive technology). Niemeyer says: "Our concern is political too – to change the world, ...Architecture is my work, and I've spent my whole life at a drawing board, but life is more important than architecture. What matters is to improve human beings."

Niemeyer was an atheist throughout his life, 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. But we are amazed by the power of the human mind … in the end, that's it—you are born, you die, that's it!". Such views never stopped him from designing religious buildings, which span from small Catholic chapels, through to huge Orthodox churches and large mosques. He also catered to the spiritual beliefs of the public who facilitated his religious buildings. In the Cathedral of Brasília, he intended for the large glass windows "to connect the people to the sky, where their Lord's paradise is."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Niemeyer#Political_and_religious_views

His main project was the new capital of Brasilia and its cathedral. What do you make of it forty years later?



Full screen interactive panorama at link.

http://kaemena360.net/FS/Brasilia/BSBCathedral/index_swf.html

[Jim__]

1. That is one amazing cathedral.

I'd love to step inside that.