- Title: BRAZIL: Architect Oscar Niemeyer dies, aged 104
- Date: 6th December 2012
- Summary: NITEROI, RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL (FILE) (ORIGINALLY 4:3) (REUTERS) CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM, WHICH WAS DESIGNED BY OSCAR NIEMEYER CLOSE OF THE CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM
- Embargoed: 21st December 2012 12:00
- Keywords:
- Location: Brazil
- Country: Brazil
- Topics: Obituaries,People
- Reuters ID: LVAEHNAHYZFKA0HAPY1Z75G0SQ0X
- Story Text: Oscar Niemeyer, a towering patriarch of modern architecture who shaped the look of contemporary Brazil and whose inventive, curved designs left their mark on cities worldwide, died late on Wednesday. He was 104.
Niemeyer had been battling kidney and stomach ailments in a Rio de Janeiro hospital since early November. His death was the result of a lung infection developed this week, the hospital said, little more than a week before he would have turned 105.
President Dilma Rousseff, whose office sits among the landmark buildings Niemeyer designed for the modernist capital city of Brasilia, paid tribute by calling him "a revolutionary, the mentor of a new architecture, beautiful, logical, and, as he himself defined it, inventive."
His body will lie in state at the presidential palace.
Starting in the 1930s, Niemeyer's career spanned nine decades. His distinctive glass and white-concrete buildings include such landmarks as the U.N. Secretariat in New York, the Communist Party headquarters in Paris and the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Brasilia.
He won the 1988 Pritzker Architecture Prize, considered the "Nobel Prize of Architecture" for the Brasilia cathedral. Its "Crown of Thorns" cupola fills the church with light and a sense of soaring grandeur even though most of the building is underground.
It was one of dozens of public structures he designed for Brazil's made-to-order capital, a city that helped define "space-age" style.
After flying over Niemeyer's pod-like Congress, futuristic presidential palace and modular ministries in 1961, Yuri Gagarin, the Russian cosmonaut and first man in space, said "the impression was like arriving on another planet."
In his home city of Rio de Janeiro, Niemeyer's many projects include the "Sambadrome" stadium for Carnival parades. Perched across the bay from Rio is the "flying saucer" he designed for the Niteroi Museum of Contemporary Art.
The collection of government buildings in Brasilia, though, remain his most monumental and enduring achievement. Built from scratch in a wild and nearly uninhabited part of Brazil's remote central plateau in just four years, it opened in 1960.
While the airplane-shaped city was planned and laid out by Niemeyer's friend Lucio Costa, Niemeyer designed nearly every important government building in the city.
An ardent communist who continued working from his Copacabana beach penthouse apartment in Rio until days before his death, Niemeyer became a national icon ranking alongside Bossa Nova pioneer Tom Jobim and soccer legend Pel� His work is celebrated for innovative use of light and space, experimentation with reinforced concrete for aesthetic value and his self-described "architectural invention" style that produced buildings resembling abstract sculpture.
Initially influenced by the angular modernism of French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier, who worked with Niemeyer and Costa on a visit to Brazil in the 1930s, his style evolved toward rounded buildings that he said were inspired by the curves of Rio's sunbathing women as well as beaches and verdant hills.
Niemeyer's legacy is heavily associated with his communist views. He was a close friend of Cuba's revolutionary leader Fidel Castro and an enemy of Brazil's 21-year military dictatorship.
Niemeyer remained politically active after returning to Brazil, taking up the cause of a militant and sometimes violent movement of landless peasants. He said in 2010 that he was a great admirer of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the former labor leader who was Brazil's president from 2003 to 2010.
Niemeyer once built a house in a Rio slum for his former driver and gave apartments and offices as presents to others.
Despite years of bohemian living, Niemeyer remained married for 76 years to Annita Baldo, his first wife. He married his second wife, longtime aide Vera Lucia Cabreira, in 2006 at the age of 99. She survives him, as do four grandchildren.
Niemeyer's only daughter, an architect, designer and gallery owner, Anna Maria, died on June 6 at the age of 82. - Copyright Holder: FILE REUTERS (CAN SELL)
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