Poetry and sensuality,
Brazil and female curves,
In soft and freed lines
Wide and infinite
Organic and fluid
Essence of a psychological philosophy
That creates freedom

Óscar Ribeiro de Almeida de Niemeyer Soares. Does this name ring a bell, so long and with so many surnames? Have you ever heard of that person? Probably not. Even for an erudite, someone like this could be easily ignored, unless he was internationally known simply as Óscar Niemeyer, one of the biggest architects of this century, born on 15^th December 1907 in Río de Janeiro.

Óscar obtained his degree in the “Escola Nacional de Belas Artes” of Río in 1934. Later on he joined a group of Brazilian architects that were helping the French architect “Le Corbusier” with the construction of the new Education Ministery in 1936, fact that influenced him and marked his life.

In 1956 he was named adviser of “Nova Cap”, organism in charge of carrying out Lucio Costa’s project. This project consisted in giving a new Capital to Brazil: Brasilia (declared Patrimony of the Humanity by Unesco). In Brazilia, the communist soul of Niemeyer and Lucio Costa encouraged them to design an equalitarian city, where directives and workers lived in the same district. They also wanted to create personal and modern buildings typical of Niemeyer’s view. The most important buildings of this architect were created in Brasilia:

El Palacio de Alvorada (1957)

La Capilla de Nuestra Señora de Fátima (1958)

El Teatro Nacional (1958)

El congreso Nacional (1958)

La Catedral Metropolitana (1958)

Niemeyer carried on working in Brasilia until the middle of the sixties when his militancy in the Communist Brazilian Party forced him to exile to France as consequence of the military dictation-ship in his country. Later on he came back to Brazil to teach in the University of Río de Janeiro and to work privately.

He created and still creates, in his 97 years of age, a type of architecture that wisely combines the Brazilian tradition with the design and the current modernity, but without forgetting his intellectual compromise.

When it comes down to create buildings and designs (which we are going to use and where we are going to live), one of the things that is always indignant, is to see how architecture loses one of the aspects it was made for initially:  its local, cultural, climatic and varied aspect. These parameters get lost unifying us in the globalisation and consumerism.

In my point of view, Niemeyer’s big achievement was to get to represent the local and cultural aspect of a nation such as Brazil through a global system of construction, always based in the idea of modernity and projection of the future as we are not talking about a man stuck in the past but that lives the present times and views the future, as it would correspond us.

Niemeyer is, above his job, a man worried for the world around him, the suffering of his people, social injustice, the blindness of the rich before the poor, in conclusion, a man that looks for a better world without luxury. Through his work we discover a human being completely compromised with the times he lives in.

Nowadays, in his 97 years of age, Oscar Niemeyer is an out-and-out communist, deeply compromised with Marxist philosophy, proud of being a communist and close friend of Fidel Castro, worried about social differences and the suffering of the more defenceless and poor ones, and who still believes in a better world.

The constant presence of Oscar Niemeyer in the field of the contemporary international architecture, from 1936 until today, has made of him a symbol around the world of the modern architecture in Brazil. He has obtained numerous awards among which the more important ones we can find the golden medal from “The American Institute of Architecture” in 1970, “The Pritzker Prize” in 1988 and the Imperial Price of Japan in 2004, the best and the highest prices that a professional in architecture could aim at.