OSCAR NIEMEYER AND
BRASÍLIA
“ I am not attracted to straight angles, or to the straight line, hard and inflexible, created by man. I am attracted to free-flowing, sensual curves,”
wrote Oscar Niemeyer in his 1998 memoir The Curves of Time. This attraction to serpentine, sweeping, technically demanding forms underpinned each of the dramatic buildings he completed during his lengthy career and that were key to his being awarded the Pritzker Prize and RIBA Gold Medal. His most celebrated achievement is the collection of futuristic buildings he designed for Brazil’s new capital Brasília, the first city less than 100 years old to receive UNESCO World Heritage status.
Rio de Janeiro had been the capital of Brazil until President Juscelino Kubitschek declared his intention to build an entirely new capital city called Brasília. He wanted to make a clear break with Rio’s Baroque buildings and ad-hoc street plan, a legacy of Brazil’s colonial past, and replace them with a new, progressive architectural language that would speak to the future prosperity of the country. Niemeyer’s architecture had the energy and ambition that Kubitschek was looking for. “As an architect,” said Niemeyer, “my concern in Brasília was to find a structural solution that would characterise the city’s architecture. So I did my very best in the structures, trying to make them different, with their columns so narrow that the palaces would seem to barely touch the ground.”
Kubitschek had known Niemeyer, a lifelong communist, for some time and was aware of his work with Le Corbusier on the Brazilian pavilion for the New York World’s Fair in 1938–39. Niemeyer’s mentor and collaborator on the pavilion had been Lúcio Costa, a leading Brazilian modernist architect and urban planner. To make his ideal of a new capital a reality, Kubitschek appointed Costa as master planner to draw up the overall concept and Niemeyer as director of works, giving him creative control over the key government buildings.
The hugely ambitious plan was to be built over just three years from 1957. It employed some 60,000 workers who raised a bold new city from an empty plateau. Brasília was inaugurated on 21 April 1960, although building work continued for years on specific buildings.
Historically, urban planning has involved the destruction of existing streets and houses, witness Haussmann’s demolition of entire quartiers of Medieval streets in Paris to make way for his Second
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