Oscar Niemeyer is one of the greatest architects of our time. Hugely influential, his work has added a new dimension to modern architecture in the twentieth century. The designer of Brasilia showed that the rhythmic, sensuous lines of Brazilian Modernism were as legitimately modern as the rectilinear lines of the Bauhaus. Oscar Niemeyer Houses showcases the houses built by this seminal modern master in a lavish format that finally does justice to his extraordinary work. Viewed as a collection, these houses serve to demonstrate the wide range of Niemeyer's prodigious genius. The designs show a personal and eclectic facet to Niemeyer's creative imagination, a side of the master little known and under-appreciated. Often built for family members or major clients, they show a wealth of solutions that respond to a wide range of sites: the steep hillsides of Rio, the Atlantic beach shore, the rain forest, and the residential neighborhoods of Rio and Sao Paulo. This celebrated work stands as an enduring and notable tribute to one of the last of the international masters of Modernism.
Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1907, Oscar Niemeyer is recognized as one of the world’s most fiercely original architects and the central figure of Brazilian architectural Modernism. The prolific designer of more than 600 buildings, Niemeyer has been in practice for seven decades. Architecture, he declares must be “functional, beautiful, and shocking.” Transgressing orthodox Modernist aesthetic doctrine and subverting hegemonic cultural models, his work privileged invention and affirmed spectacle and luxury, pleasure, beauty, and sensuality as legitimate architectural pursuits.
This gorgeously illustrated book explores the development of Niemeyer’s extraordinary body of ideas and forms as well as his role in the construction of Brazil’s modern image and cultural tradition. Through a detailed discussion of his intoxicating experiments in reinforced concrete, the book offers the opportunity to relish the stream of pleasures afforded by Niemeyer’s important buildings, including his mid-century projects as chief architect for the new capital of BrasÃlia, and the spectacular Niterói Museum of Contemporary Art, completed in 1996. Providing the first comprehensive analysis of Niemeyer’s radical work and dissident perspective, Oscar Niemeyer: Curves of Irreverence sheds new light on the route the architect has followed as well as on Brazilian Modernism as a non-conformist project informed by a nationalist and anti-colonialist stance.
Oscar Niemeyer (b.1907) is the last of the great, decisive, form-giving modern architects of the twentieth century. In this informal, fluid autobiography, he reveals how philosophy, politics and his many passions including his large family, many friends, the sensuous land and open skies of Brazil, the female body, art and literature have formed the key to his architecture and his vibrant life. This first English edition of the iconic architect's memoirs is now available in paperback to mark his 100th birthday.
Oscar Niemeyer, one of the most prolific architects of the 20th century, has long been considered a pioneer of modern architecture. This book is an intimate exploration of one man's unique vision, and his commitment to it even as he faced exile from his home country, Brazil. Niemeyer's crowning achievement was the creation of a new capital for Brazil. Named chief architect for Brasilia, Niemeyer used his signature style - a play on the contrast between curves and concrete - to design its major buildings and left his mark on an entire nation. Now 92 years old, Niemeyer remains one of the greatest living architects of our time. With an in-depth interview and photographs by Matthieu Salvaing - who traveled with Niemeyer from Rio to Brasilia, from Sao Paulo to Belo Horizonte, this book is the candid testimony of a living legend.
Some people live to work while others work to live, and based on this charmingly relaxed and meandering memoir, it would seem that Oscar Niemeyer definitely falls in the latter category. Not to say that he doesn't spend considerable time here musing on his crowning achievement, Brasilia. It's just that he does so the same way that he recounts everything else here, dispensing with details and strict linearity (much like in his built work), shifting casually between different points in time (including the very days he is working on what became this book), and focusing on the human relationships and friendships behind a project (such as with Lucia Costa, his mentor and the so-called "father of Brazilian modernism," as well as Le Corbusier) than their technical, administrative, and budgetary minutiae. Niemeyer designed the vast majority of the municipal buildings for Brasilia, the city built "overnight" in the 1960s out of the desolate interior of his native Brazil to serve as the country's new capital, and the sensuously curvy modernism of its skyline has effectively become his stylistic signature, even if he didn't anticipate the vast and ugly exurban sprawl that has since come to ring the city's dazzling axial core.
So much more than a professional memoir, this is really the unhurried, and endearingly nostalgic, reminiscences of a passionate man motivated not so much by professional or financial gain (in fact, he claims, he worked for years on Brasilia at the base rate of an average civil servant) as by a profound, even melancholic, love for his beautiful and troubled country; the ongoing struggle for relief from political and economic oppression around the world; and, above all, a vast web of lifelong friendships. To wit, there are far more photos here of Niemeyer with his Brazilian cronies (many long dead, he laments openly) than there are of his projects (one reason why those not already somewhat familiar with his output may want to start elsewhere), and far more recounted about their prank-filled road trips between Rio and Brasilia than about the work that actually went on there. Those tales, and all of Niemeyer's anecdotes and gentle, quirky musings here, possess a kind of melancholic glow, evocative of samba, wine, and the "uninhibited" women of his homeland.
He reminisces lyrically about Paris, Italy, and Algiers, where he lived and designed projects for much of the period during which Brazil was under a repressive dictatorship. But even amid his delight in world travel, his homesickness is apparent. "I want to watch the stars / I want to feel life / And be back in Brazil / That's where I want to live," goes a characteristically openhearted poem he wrote in those years of near-forced exile. It is the land and the people of his beloved Brazil, much more so than any or all of what he designed there or elsewhere, that make up the soul of this unconventional and thoroughly lovely memoir from one of the 20th century's most talented, and passionate, architects. --Timothy Murphy
Author:Â Oscar Neimeyer
Hardcover:Â
192 pages
Company:Â Phaidon PressÂ
(2000-01-10)
ISBN:Â 0714840076
List Price:Â $24.95
Amazon Price:Â $6.24
Used Price:Â $6.25