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Oscar Niemeyer in front of his Niterói Contemporary Art Museum, Rio de Janeiro
1907 is the year before Adolf Loos wrote Ornament & Crime, two years before Marinetti wrote the Futurist Manifesto, and 17 years before Malevich published the Suprematist Manifesto. In 1907, Oscar Niemeyer was born in Rio de Janeiro. Maybe the great architect’s long life, which ended on Wednesday 5 December 2012 in a Rio Hospital, could be described as being dedicated to – by way of a persuasive counter-model – unravelling that strange entanglement between modernist avant-garde and masculinist anxiety. Loos, Marinetti and Malevich all in different ways expressed their desire for purity in terms that went hand in hand with contempt for women and the ‘primitive’. In Oscar Niemeyer architectural world, purity suddenly became based on embracing rather than rejecting conviviality, femininity, tropicality.
In May this year, I for the first time (thanks to an invitation by ABACT and SP-Arte) had the opportunity to visit three of Niemeyer’s most important buildings: the Pampulha casino and Saint Francis of Assissi church in Belo Horizonte (both conceived in 1940 and completed in 1943), and the Copan Building in Saõ Paulo (constructed 1957–66). The Pampulha complex (which includes three more buildings: a restaurant with dance hall, a yacht club, and a golf club) was Niemeyer’s first major ‘solo’ commission, at the age of 33. The mayor of Belo Horizonte whom had entrusted him with this ambitious task, Juscelino Kubitschek, became Brazil’s president from 1956 until 1961, a man under whose reign the capital of Brazília was constructed, largely led by architects Lúcio Costa and Niemeyer, with the latter’s landmark government and cultur buildings.
After having worked with Le Corbusier in 1935 on the groundbreaking modernist design of the Ministry of Health and Education skyscraper in Rio (along with other architects including Costa), Niemeyer’s Pampulha casino marks his departure from the rigid geometric rules of the Swiss master architect. At first, upon approaching and entering the building from the street, it’s still in line with Corbusier’s villa architecture of the 1910s to ‘30s: the horizontal rectangular, geometrically reduced structure, the elegantly slender columns, the walk-up ramps, the panoramic framed vistas onto the landscape (in the case of Pampulha, onto an artificial lake around which the commissioned buildings are located). But once inside, you start to recognize flamboyant aspects: the solid silvery steel cover of the columns and railings, and one wall being entirely covered by mirror glass – after all, this was conceived to be used as a casino, a place for pleasure and vanity (today it’s the Museu de Arte de Pampulha, which at the time of my visit had an interesting show on of fragile, subtle interventions working with drying mud, transparent tubes or old photographs, by Peruvian, Belo-Horizonte-based artist Nydia Negromonte).
Venturing further into the building, flamboyance becomes even more present and playful once you enter the circular part of the building. There you find a kidney-shaped stage, in front of that a milk-glass-tiled dance floor, surrounded by a semi-circular panorama window overlooking the lake. On the ground floor beneath, it turns out that the kidney-shaped stage is actually an elevator, which allowed for the casino band to be moved down automatically while playing.
Down on the ground floor they would play behind glass, while people could look up to the milk-glass and see the shimmering shadows of dancers moving across it. And, as the legend goes, Niemeyer thought most of this up during one single, long night in a hotel. In any case, he managed to conciliate geometrical reductivism with organic curves, and functionality with friskiness. Even with a church.
Just as the self-confessed atheist and communist would infuse the idea of a casino with a sense of measured, anti-dogmatic playfulness, his design for the Saint Francis of Assissi church is as daring as it is modest (the local Archbishop didn’t like it, and called it ‘the devil’s bomb-shelter’; I’m sure Niemeyer was pleased).
You can almost see him having jotted down the initial design of the undulating curve that forms its concrete roof late that night, slightly tipsy, freehand with a fountain pen. Erich Mendelsohn had famously conceived the daringly curved forms of the Einsteinturm in Potsdam, Germany, in 1917, as a freehand sketch on a small piece of paper, while a soldier in the trenches of World War I. While the Einsteinturm had eventually to be built with bricks and stucco, ‘faking’ self-supporting curved structures, the steel-concrete technique Mendelsohn had hoped to be able to use was eventually ready for Niemeyer. The curves were predating a lot of later designs of concrete shell roof structures.
The church is delicate and small; the Copan in Saõ Paulo is huge, majestic. It’s 140 metres, 38 floors high, and its combined floor area is apparently the largest of any residential building in the world. The building’s sinuous lamella façade reflects the elegance and beauty of Brazil, but its social history also reflects a country torn between prosperity and obscene poverty, nihilist ruthlessness and optimist communality. Built for modern urbanites, it slid into disaster during the 1980s when it became ruled by drug dealers and pimps – at points even the police didn’t dare go in anymore. Since the 1990s, it has gradually been refurbished and revived under the header of turning rental into private owned space. The issues of gentrification implied by that are obvious, but in any case the Brazilian artist Claudia Medeiros Cardoso, whom I had met at SP-Arte – through her former teacher at the art academy in Bremen, Germany, the painter Norbert Schwontkowsky – had bought together with her husband and son a flat on the 24th floor, about ten years ago, for a sum that wouldn’t get you much in Bremen, let alone Saõ Paulo. So here was a rare opportunity, thanks to Claudia, to see how a family actually lives in this kind of place. The views, of course, were breath-taking up there: the endless cityscape of Sao Paulo gleaming in sunset light.
Again, the concrete, tile-covered lamellas directly outside the windows – circa a metre or so wide – are a good example of how Niemeyer combined function and friskiness: in the summer when the sun is high the lamellas provide shadow, in the winter when the sun is low they let it in; yet at the same time they provide a playful cinematic effect, framing the vista as if you were watching a cinemascope film. The layout of the flat felt comfortable and unobtrusive, while details offered surprises: next to the kitchen is a kind of veranda-type space with a concrete grid wall reminiscent of an oriental patio – warm wind comes in through the holes, making you realize that while the grid wall suggests a domestic ground floor outside, you’re actually still up on the 24th floor. Amazing.
When I was in Brazil in May, Rodrigo Moura (curator at Inhotim) told me that Niemeyer had been to hospital, and that people were concerned about his well-being. At over a hundred, smoking cigars and still making designs, people surely wanted him to live forever. Through his legacy, he does.