THE LAST GREAT TEACHER.

Eduardo Cadaval

On December 5, 2012, just 10 days after his 105th birthday, Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer died in his native Rio de Janeiro. Niemeyer was a universal man: the last great master of modern architecture. His name and his work are inscribed alongside that of a handful of the greatest architects and creators of the 20th century.

To understand the scale of his figure, it is enough to see the enormous reaction that his death generated throughout the world, and in particular in Brazil. It was not only the upper echelons who mourned his death, but people from all walks of life joined in the mourning and the organized tributes to say goodbye to him and exalt his figure. What architect of today would generate such a reaction or would be worthy of 7 days of national mourning to honor his death? The answer is very simple: none. The national mourning is something reserved for the great statesmen or for enormous artists who have been able to reach the most intimate of us. Niemeyer was something of both, an architect who with a sense of state helped build a country but also filled it with works of art capable of moving anyone.

Belonging to a wealthy Rio de Janeiro family, Niemeyer spent part of his childhood drawing lines on paper or in the air, a hobby that would end up taking him naturally to architecture and that not only would continue for the rest of his life but would strongly mark his work. . His buildings are subtle brushstrokes in the landscape or in the city, and his drawings are as synthetic and elegant as the rest of his architectural work. Thus, newly married, he decided to start his career late. As a student he met Lucio Costa with whom he would later work for free in order to be his apprentice. Initial disciple of the great masters of modern architecture such as Le Corbusier or Mies Van der Rohe, very soon he became one of them, and was even able to carry out some of the projects his masters only dreamed of. He belonged to the so-called second generation of modern architects; Heirs to the rigor and vision of the modern movement, architects such as Alvar Aalto, Louis Kahn or himself questioned various aspects of the newly established canon and at the same time knew how to enrich its language. Niemeyer distanced himself: “We are free to build tomorrow’s past today.”

Known as the poet of concrete and stereotyped as the enemy of the straight, many of his buildings show that he actually resorted to orthogonality to masterfully contrast or contain his undulating language, and thus enrich it. He questioned the modern precept that “form followed function”; He defended that Beauty – that word so reviled by his contemporaries – was important because it made us forget reason, that buildings had to create surprises, fantasies, different solutions.

Oscar Niemeyer’s work system was also particular. Like many architects, he began a project studying the site and its social and economic conditions. Then he began to draw freely until he felt that he had something solid between his hands; then, in an unusual gesture, he would leave the drawing board to write a critical text of the project. If in this text he did not find sufficient reasons to justify his ideas, then he would return to the work table and start drawing from scratch. Niemeyer taught us the importance of architecture when it’s done right: their buildings look just as good today as they did the day they were built; creations of the magnitude of the buildings of Brasilia or the headquarters of the United Nations in New York of which he was co-author even small masterpieces such as the Casa de las Canoas of his property.

By having such a wide production (around 600 projects), the set of his work has some inequalities. From moments of sublime intensity to other less intense episodes and some even monotonous and repetitive. But as the critic and historian William Curtís points out, what is important about his legacy is not a collection of buildings but a creative universe. Niemeyer’s work demonstrated the true potential of architecture, that of improving the world and changing people’s lives. Its architecture was elegant and dynamic, with subtlety it knew how to work at all scales and its buildings responded to the individual and proximity as well as they did to the city or the landscape. His work is not samba but rather a soft Brazilian jazz.

After having built Brasilia in practically a 4-year term, and having work throughout the country, the military coup exiled him from Brazil but at the same time allowed the world to enjoy his work. He took refuge in Paris where he was able to build the Headquarters of the Communist Party, thanks to a decree from President De Gaulle that authorized him to work in France. Also in this period he built the impeccable building of the prestigious Mondadori publishing house in Italy and the campus of the Constantina University in Algeria.

Niemeyer was an idealist and a bohemian; Eduardo Galeano said that he hated both capitalism and the right angle. He always worked in favor of the less privileged; “The poor man’s turn never comes,” he said. He was a fighter for various social causes and an active member of the Socialist Party of Brazil. This caused him to be denied a United States visa on several occasions, despite the fact that Mayor La Guardia had declared him a Distinguished Citizen of New York or that Harvard University had invited him to direct its school of architecture and urban planning. He hated high society parties but at the same time the music, conversation and laughter sessions in his studio in Copacabana are famous. From Fidel Castro to practically all of the most transcendental characters of Latin American and world culture and politics walked there. In this same studio, in recent times, his wife Vera Lucia played the piano every afternoon to break the monotony of the work sessions.

When Niemeyer spoke, he spoke little about architecture, he was more interested in other aspects of life, such as social struggles, politics or the most disadvantaged. When he finally spoke of architecture, he used terms such as beauty and poetry, words that deep down everyone understands and that architects do not know how to use or that we spoil by using them frivolously. He was just an exceptional character. He remarried at 98, and at 103 seemed to be the only credible architect to talk about sensuality in architecture. Towards the end of his life he continually repeated that what interested him were the simple things, that life was a breath, and that the only truly important thing in this world was women. He obtained the highest recognitions that an architect can receive, among them the Pritzker Prize (the nobel of architecture), and the Prince of Asturias, but neither of them went to collect them. He wanted to be remembered as “a human being who passed through the earth like everyone else” and spoke constantly of “the greatness of the universe and how small we are.” He remembered with pride that his grandfather “had been a useful man and that he had died poor.” He said goodbye to the world from a hospital bed where days before he still gave instructions on some ongoing projects.

The reaction that his death generated in Brazil also seems to show that Niemeyer belonged to a time that no longer exists; a time when the public was privileged over the private and where the modernity of a country under construction was evidenced in part through the buildings that came out of their hands. The tributes after his death give the feeling of being in part also the celebration at the same time through his figure, a time in which everything seemed possible and in which a country was building its own future. No matter the advanced age with which he died or the fullness with which he lived his life, architects will always miss him, his death leaves us orphans of the figure of the architect that we want to become. Have a good trip, master.