Although he was the defender of utilitarianism, his creations did not develop a blockish coldness ofttimes criticized by post-moderns. His buildings st& forms thus moral force and curves then sensual that numbers of admirers say that he is extra monumental as a sculptor than as an architect. the few critics assume a equivalent to exist as a defect.

Oscar Niemeyer & his contribution to the construction of the city of Brasília is portrayed and somewhat parodied in the 1964 French movie ''L'homme de Rio (That Man From Rio''), starring Jean-Paul Belmondo.

Early Life

Oscar Niemeyer was innate in the city of Rio de Janeiro in 1907, on a street that late would receive the title of his granddaddy Ribeiro de Almeida. He spent his youth as a average immature Carioca of the time: bohemian and relatively unconcerned by having his new. He concluded his secondary education at age Twenty-one. A equivalent season, he married Annita Baldo, girl of Italian immigrants from Padua. Marriage gave him the feel of responsibility: he decided to operate & enter university.

He began to function within his father's typography house and entered the Escola de Belas Artes, from which he graduated when engineer architect in 1934. At a instance he experienced fiscal difficulties however decided to operate forswearing fee anyway, in the architecture studio of Lúcio Costa and Carlos Leão. He felt unsatisfied by owning the architecture that he saw in the streets & believed he may locate a career there.

Around 1945, already an architect of some reputation, he joined a Brazilian Communist Party. Niemeyer was a son at the period of the Russian Revolution, a immature dreamer in a period of the Second World War and lived most of his life in a period of the Cold War. He was enthusiastically communist, the position which would numbers him tremendously later on inside his life. In a period of the military dictatorship of Brazil his office was raided & he was forced into exile around Europe. A Minister of Astronautics of a instance reportedly said that "the place for a communist architect is Moscow." He visited the USSR, met with diverse socialist leaders & became the individual friend of a bit of of the babies. Fidel Castro once said: "Niemeyer and I are the last Communists of this planet."

First works
Within 1936, Lúcio Costa was appointed by Education Minister Gustavo Capanema architect of the newly headquarters for the Ministry of Education & Public Health inside Rio De Janeiro. Within 1939, Niemeyer assumed a leadership of the team of designer (Lúcio Costa, Carlos Leão, Affonso Eduardo Reidy, Jorge Moreira, Ernani Vasconcellos & Oscar Niemeyer, by owning Le Corbusier acting as a consultant around 1936) responsible a Ministry that got assumed a project of shaping the ‘novo homem, Brasileiro e moderno’ (freshly human, Brazilian & modern).

A task, known as Capanema Palace, in 1985, was pleasantly bold for the instance. It was a number 1 government Modernist modernist building in the Americas, and of the tremendously big shell than anything Le Corbusier experienced built until so. Completed around 1943, a building which housed the regulator & manager of Brazilian culture & ethnical heritage developed all the elements of what wwhen to get recognised as Brazilian modernist movement: it employed local materials & techniques, such as a ajulezos linked to a Portuguese tradition; a revolutionised Corbusian brises-soleil, manufactured adjustable & related to the Moorish shading gear of compound architecture; bold colours; the tropical gardens of Roberto Burle Marx; a Imperial Palm (roystonea oleraceæ), called a Brazilian the correct sequence; more allusions to the icons of the Brazilian landscape; & the integrated, specially licenced works of Brazilian creative person.

Around 1939 Niemeyer traveled with Lúcio Costa to project a Brazilian marquee in the New York World's Fair. At once while Europe & a United States were concentrating their industrial powers in World War II, Brazil was investing in architecture. A united states laid itself inside the vanguard of international modernist architecture, in which it remained until decades late, in heavy a portion thanks to the talent of Niemeyer.

The Pampulha project

Around 1940 Niemeyer met Juscelino Kubitschek, who was at a period a city manager of Belo Horizonte, capital of the state of Minas Gerais. He & Minah Gerais Governor Benedito Valadares wanted to have the freshly suburbia northerly of the city known as Pampulha, and licenced Niemeyer to project a series of buildings to become referred to as the "Pampulha complex".

A buildings were completed inside 1943, and provoked a select few argument. It received international eclat as a consequence a 1942 exhibition of Brazilian architecture (Colonial & Modern) at a Just released York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). A conservative Church authorities of Minas Gerais refused to consecrate a Church of Saint Francis of Assisi, inside a portion due to its maverick form, in a portion due to the mural painted by Candido Portinari and the fact that it contained no confessional. A wall painting depicts Christ when a saviour of a ailment, a poor people &, virtually all importantly, the evildoer.

Around Pampulha, Niemeyer began to mark his style: he utilized a structural properties of the armed concrete to give sinuate forms to the building. Once Niemeyer draws a building he makes it by owning the minimum of conceivable traces, when organic & shivering as a gesture of the hand. Yet, he denies that his buildings own an esthetic other significant than work: he typically wrote elaborate justifications of a details of his projects, wherein he described the work of both curve of the building. He said that around case he may not justify an idea in a single paragraph, he gave it higher. As well later on he would say that the form that conveys beauty is utile within itself.

The 1940s and 1950s
Inside 1947, his world-wide recognition was confirmed whilst Niemeyer traveled to the United States to design a headquarters of the United Nations in New York. In the last season he got received an invitation to teach at Yale University; however, his visa was denied because of his socialist beliefs. Within 1950 a number one book all about his operate was published in the America by Stamo Papadaki.

Within Brazil, he designed São Paulo's Ibirapuera Park (for the celebrations of the city's 400th anniversary) & within 1951 the [[COPAN] Apartment Building], and the JK Building in Belo Horizonte . In 1952 he built his own house in Rio De Janeiro, the House at Canoas (casa das canoas), and in 1954 the Niemeyer luxury apartment building, in Belo Horizonte.

In 1954 he was called to design the Museum of Modern Art of Caracas (MAM Caracas). It was the first work where Niemeyer worked in order to create a symbol: architecture as a symbol. This kind of strategy was used later in Brasilia's projects. The building never was constructed but the drawings and the pictures of the model let us see Niemeyer's future style. Then Juscelino Kubitschek, elected president of Brazil in 1956, once again came in contact with Niemeyer. This time his plans were far more ambitious: he put Niemeyer in the head of Novacap, a project to move the national capital to a depopulated region in the center of the country.

Brasília
Niemeyer organized a competition for the urbanistic lay-out of Brasília, the new capital, and the winner was the project of his old master and great friend, Lúcio Costa. Niemeyer would design the buildings and Lucio the plan of the city.

In the space of a few months, Niemeyer designed a large number of residential, commercial and government buildings. Among them were the residence of the President (Palácio da Alvorada), the House of the deputy, the National Congress, the Cathedral of Brasília, diverse ministries, not to mention residential buildings. Viewed from above, the city can be seen to have elements that repeat themselves in every building, giving it a formal unity. The cathedral of Brasília is especially beautiful, with diverse modern symbolism. Its entrance is a dimly-lit corridor that contrasts with the bright, naturally illuminated hall.

Behind the construction of Brasília lay a monumental campaign to construct an entire city in the barren center of the country, thousands of kilometers from any major city. The brainchild of Kubitschek, his aims included stimulating the national industry, integrating the country's distant areas, populating inhospitable regions, and bringing progress to a region where only cattle ranching had a foothold (many historians compare the construction of Brasília with the American colonization of its west). Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa used it to test new concepts of city planning: streets without transit (Niemeyer would say that it is a disrespect to the human being that it takes more than 20 minutes in the transport of a region to another one), buildings floating off the ground supported by columns and allowing the space underneath to be free and integrated with nature.

The project also had a socialist ideology: in Brasília all the apartments would be owned by the government and rented to its employees. Brasília did not have "nobler" regions, meaning that top ministers and common laborers would share the same building. Of course many of these concepts were ignored or changed by other presidents with different visions in later years. Brasília was designed, constructed, and inaugurated within four years. After it, Niemeyer was nominated head chief of the college of architecture of the University of Brasília. In 1963, he became an honorary member of the American Architects Institute of the United States; the same year, he received a Soviet prize, the Lenin peace prize.

In 1964, after being invited by Abba Hushi, the mayor of Haifa, Israel, to plan the campus of the University of Haifa, he came back to a completely different Brazil. In March president João Goulart, who succeeded president Jânio Quadros in 1961, was deposed in a military coup. A General assumed command of the country, changing the lives of all Brazilians.

Exile and projects overseas

The leftist position of Niemeyer would cost him much during the CIA-backed Cold War military dictatorship. His office was pillaged, the headquarters of the magazine he coordinated was destroyed, his projects mysteriously began to be refused and clients disappeared.

In 1965, two hundred professors asked for his resignation from the University of Brasília, in protest against the government treatment of universities. In the same year he traveled to France for an exhibition in the Louvre museum.

In the following year, his work hindered in Brazil, Niemeyer moved to Paris. There he started a new phase of his life and workmanship. He opened an office on the Champs-Élysées, and had customers in diverse countries, especially in Algeria where, among others he designed the University of Constantine. In France he created the headquarters of the French Communist Party, and in Italy that of the Mondadori publishing company.

1980s to the present
The dictatorship lasted 21 years. In the 1980s it softened and gradually turned into a democracy. At this time Niemeyer decided to return to his country. He himself defines this time as the beginning of the last phase of his life. During that decade he made the Memorial Juscelino Kubitschek (1980), the Pantheon (1985) and the Latin America Memorial (1987), the last a beautiful sculpture representing the wounded hand of Jesus, whose wound bleeds in the shape of Central and South America.

In 1988 Oscar Niemeyer was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize, together with the American architect Gordon Bunshaft.

He designed at least two more buildings in Brasilia, small ones that are arguably among his greatest, the [http://www.fredcamper.com/R/Brazil/Brasilia.html#Memorial Memorial dos Povos Indigenas] ("Memorial for the Indigenous People") and the [http://www.fredcamper.com/R/Brazil/Brasilia.html#Catedral Catedral Militar, Igreja de N.S. da Paz].

In 1996, at 89 years old, he created what many consider his greatest work: the Niterói Contemporary Art Museum (in the city of Niterói, a city next to Rio de Janeiro). The building flies from a rock, giving a beautiful view of the Guanabara Bay and the city of Rio de Janeiro. Critics of the museum say the building is so exotic that it upstages the works of art inside it.

In 2003, Niemeyer was called to design the Serpentine Gallery Summer Pavilion in Hyde Park London, a gallery that each year invites a famous architect who has never previously built in the UK, to design this temporary structure.

On December 10, 2004, a tombstone of Communist Carlos Marighella, in Salvador, Bahia was inaugurated to celebrate the 35th anniversary of his death. The tombstone was designed by Niemeyer.

Today, Niemeyer is over 97 and still discerning, active and brilliant. Niemeyer is still involved in diverse projects, mainly sculptures and readjustments of old works of his that, protected by national (and some cases international) historic heritage regulations, can only be modified by him.