“I have been drawing an oval since childhood”

The hundredth anniversary of the architect Oscar Niemeyer is celebrated at the Museum of Architecture

The Shchusev Museum of Architecture has opened an exhibition dedicated to the centenary of the legendary Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer. For obvious reasons, the hero of the day himself was not at the opening day. He was congratulated via teleconference. Oscar Niemeyer Suaris Filho was born and educated in Rio de Janeiro. Like many great Latin Americans of the twentieth century, from an early age he was a staunch democrat and socialist. In 1967, he designed the headquarters of the French Communist Party, whose shining vault was intended to show the beauty of the ideals for which the party fought. More recently, the architect completed several projects for Cuba, and Fidel Castro once said that there were two real communists left in the world: he and Niemeyer... Even the architect’s love for cheap, democratic concrete instead of expensive titanium shells (a clear attack against the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, built by Frank Gehry) has an ideological basis. And with all this, it is difficult to find more refined, subtle and aristocratic forms than those created by the winner of the Soviet Peace Prize, who was banned from entering the United States, architect Oscar Niemeyer.

His first remarkable work, the Pampulha recreation area on a lake near Belo Horizonto, was commissioned by the city prefect, Juscelino Kubitschek. Having become president of Brazil, Kubizek creates a new capital, moving it from the ocean to a deep, underdeveloped region of the country. It is there that a city is born, the plan of which to some resembles a flying butterfly, to others - a jet plane. Started in 1953, the city of Brasilia is still developing today, but its radiant image became familiar to the whole world forty years ago. Here Niemeyer's style reaches its highest harmony. Like his mentor Corbusier, he creates horizontal ceilings suspended in the air, turning walls into gigantic glass surfaces. But the hard lines and right angles, the laconic rationalism of the European avant-garde are not close to him. Niemeyer says he always preferred curved lines. “What I like is a free and sensual curve. That curve that I see in the mountains of my country, in the winding beds of its rivers, in the clouds in the sky, in the body of a beloved woman. The whole Universe was created from the curve.”

The ensemble created by Niemeyer is a structure of elongated, pointed light arches, serpentine roof strips, concrete bowls: in the Presidential Palace complex, one faces the sky, the other faces the earth. The fabulous, sleepy world of these forms is a bit reminiscent of Dali’s paintings, but their mood is purely optimistic. By creating a square with the palaces of the Three Powers, Niemeyer wanted to “see them full of dreamy and poetic forms.” The Itamarata Palace consists of huge, very high and light arches, and in the Alvorada Palace the arches carefully support the roof with their thin points. Column arches are similar to the images of surrealists because they have character, behavior, and emotion. Curved forms, similar to standing boomerangs, are crowded into a circle and together create the ecstatic appearance of the Cathedral. This building so simply and clearly personifies spiritual ascension that it has become the hallmark of the city and its architect.

At the exhibition you can get acquainted with many projects known and unknown to us - the UN building in New York, the arched facade of the Mondadori publishing house in Milan, the university in Algeria covered with a colossal twisted plane, the Latin American memorial in Sao Paulo with a bloody palm rising in front of it. They said about Niemeyer that he was more of a sculptor than an architect - his large forms, molded from rough concrete, are so plastic and fused with the landscape. However, he also loves tense buildings that argue with the environment.

Niemeyer's role in the architecture of the twentieth century is twofold. On the one hand, it showed that the new capital of a great state could become an architectural holiday, a dream of a wonderful future. The closest “echo of Brasilia” to us in time is Astana, the current capital of Kazakhstan. On the other hand, Niemeyer created many idea houses, examples of forms moving away from the strict geometricism of the West. And here, in my opinion, he is surprisingly close to Konstantin Melnikov, from whom both Ilya Golosov at the Zuev Club and Mikhail Posokhin at the Montreal USSR Pavilion took plastic ideas from him over the years. The Moscow building of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, designed by Posokhin Sr. - a double skyscraper and a cylinder at its foot - is compared with the building of the Presidential Palace in Brasilia. Visitors to the exhibition will also be able to think about the prototypes of the Kremlin Palace of Congresses. The exhibition, organized by GNIMA with the participation of the Russian Avant-Garde Foundation for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage, is an infusion of good architecture into our feverish construction life. It is symbolic that the foundation is also involved in the creation of the Melnikov Museum.

The poet Pavel Kogan wrote lines expressing the uncompromising enthusiasm of a man of the thirties: “Since childhood I have not liked an oval! // I have been drawing a corner since childhood!” But Niemeyer wrote: “Since childhood I have not liked angles; since childhood I have drawn an oval.” Sophisticated avant-garde? Or a return from an idea to a person?

Boris M. SOKOLOV