In Memoriam: Oscar Niemeyer

Here, then, is what I wanted to tell you of my architecture. I created it with courage and idealism, but also with an awareness of the fact that what is important is life, friends and attempting to make this unjust world a better place in which to live. (Oscar Niemeyer)

Renowned Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer (December 15, 1907 - December 5, 2012) died yesterday in Rio de Janeiro. The last of the great Modern (with a capital "M") architects, he was just 10 days shy of his 105th birthday. He was one of my heroes.

Why such a hero to me? Honestly, I can't really even put my finger on it. Writing about his life and work a few years ago, I called both the man and his work "A Strange Paradox." He was by all accounts a visionary, an artist, a lover of life--and he defined the image of a nation quite literally with his extensive work in Brasilia, Brazil's mid-century ex nihilo capital. But he was also an atheist, communist, exile whose love for life was, it seems to me, mediated by a melancholic longing for something more.

Though I had the privilege of being around a number of "famous" architects while in grad school at Yale, I am not generally the star-struck architecture fan type. Niemeyer was different for me, though. Until learning of his death last night, I secretly held on to a long-time dream of "some day" meeting him, even if only to shake hands and say a few words. At 104 and still at work, one could imagine him living forever. The closest I came was during a trip to Rio de Janeiro in 2009. As we were working out the details of our itinerary, I corresponded via e-mail with his office trying to arrange a brief meeting, but I was not able to work anything out.

Coincidentally enough, I was actually thinking about Niemeyer yesterday. That tends to happen when early December rolls around and I remember his upcoming birthday. I walked over to the bookshelves in my office where I keep all of my architecture books. I browsed the section of Niemeyer books (I have close to a dozen) and picked up his memoir, The Curves of Time, which I read a few years ago. Crossing the line completely into star-struck-fan, I even though, "I wonder if I could mail this to him to sign for me?"

I have been fortunate to be able to see a number of Niemeyer's notable works in the past few years in Rio de Janeiro, Curitiba, and Belo Horizonte, Brazil and in Milan, Italy. Some visits were pilgrimages that my family graciously indulged me with, while other projects were simply viewed in passing. I've included some photos from these trips below.

Outside the Museum of Contemporary Art in Niteroi, across the bay from Rio de Janeiro

(December 2009).

The kiddos being cool in front of the Ministry of Education and Health in Rio de Janeiro.

(December 2009)

Heading through the 2nd floor reception room of the Ministry of Education and Health out to the lush rooftop garden.

(December 2009)

In front of the Museu Oscar Niemeyer in Curitiba, Brazil.

(July 2011)

We were looking for a grocery store in Belo Horizonte and stumbled upon this residential building by Niemeyer.

(July 2011)

The sinuous curves of the Casa do Baile (Dance Hall) on the lake in Pampulha, Belo Horizonte.

(July 2011)

Ex casino in Pampulha, now an art museum.

(July 2011)

Happy architect in front of the Chapel of St. Francis in Belo Horizonte.

(July 2011)

Brasilia from the air, with the monumental axis where may of Niemeyer's iconic government buildings are situated running from lower left to upper right in the photo. This has got to be on one of our next Brazil trips!

(July 2011)

Additional Resources:

I've written about Niemeyer on Through the Oculus (here), and I've also written some research papers about Niemeyer and his work while in graduate school (here and here).

Here are some links to recent articles in response to Niemeyer's death: ABC, Arch Daily, Arch Daily Brasil, Archinect, BBC, CNN, Fox News Latino, O Globo, O Globo (2), O Globo (3), The Guardian, Tue Guardian (2), Huffington Post, The Independent, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, NPR, The Telegraph, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.

Toronto Modern

I was in Toronto last week for the 10th annual Greenbuild conference and expo.  Though my short time in the city was spent primarily in the convention center attending seminars and visiting product booths, I took a few hours one glorious afternoon to take a brisk walk around downtown.

First stop, the Toronto-Dominion Centre by Mies van der Rohe in the late 1960s.

A view up to the Mies monoliths from the grassy lawn.  The buildings appear to be undergoing a re-cladding or re-painting of the curtain wall.  I wonder how the architects of the renovation have taken into account Mies' vision within the context of modern technologies and advancements in building envelope design?

Apparently, I missed a major feature of the TD Centre when I did not pass through to the banking pavilion on the northeast corner of the block (a cousin to the post office at the Chicago Federal Center).  Oops!  However, I thought the lawn near the southwest corner of the complex was a nice respite from the usual paved plaza of Mies' other urban work.  I walked through the area near the end of lunch time, and the lawn and surrounding granite benches were still being heavily used, which is always a good sign in a public place.

I love the simple glass box lobby with travertine walls--classic hallmarks of Mies.  One thing I noticed for the first time, however, was the tiled soffit.  I do not know if this is typical of other Mies high-rises, but it gave a nice gloss to the ceiling inside and out and added to the lightness at the base of the large buildings.

A couple blocks north, I stopped by Toronto's city hall by Finnish architect Viljo Revell in the early 1960s.  Revell is a sort of one-hit-wonder architect and is most famous for Toronto's city hall but relatively unknown otherwise.  Currently, they appear to be doing some renovation work on the glass facades of the towers.

Toronto's city hall exhibits just the kind of free-form "fun" Modernism that I tend to be drawn to.  Though the plaza in front seems well-used (there was a farmer's market on the day I visited) the urban environment suffers a bit from the sterile bleakness of many aging Modern public spaces.  (I am reminded of my visit to photograph Albany's Empire State Plaza on a weekend, where during my entire visit, I saw fewer than half-a-dozen people in the vast public space.)

Although I think the form of the two towers gently enclosing the UFO...er, council chamber...is formally elegant, I cannot help but think that their windowless outer face turns the towers' proverbial back on the city, focusing inward on the bureaucracy of city government.  It makes sense that something like this would have been built within the context of mid-century urban renewal, where in cities across the continent whole neighborhoods were bulldozed for monumental, internally-focused (often governmental) projects, but it seems out of touch with a vibrant urban community that I get the sense of when I am in Toronto.

One of the recent attempts to both "green" and humanize city hall is the addition of a green roof, gardens, and public space on the roof of the building's podium.  The design is by PLANT Architect of Toronto, and I must say that it is a welcome and beautiful addition to the building.  It was delightful to walk up the long ramp to the roof and enter a world of bugs, cricket sounds, and playful birds.  Though the sounds of "nature" were not quite enough to drown out all the sirens, car horns, and buses of the surrounding city, the elevation above the street and the connection with a natural landscape (contrived, but beautiful of course), was a great respite.

Gravel and paved paths wind their way around the city hall towers, with benches and seats providing spots to rest, read, or relax.  As I think about it now, I wish there had been a bit of a water feature to provide some white noise over the city, but during my visit, I did not really find the experience lacking.

What looks like bush-hammered concrete on the outer face of the city hall towers a la Paul Rudolph and the Yale Art & Architecture Building is really something quite extraordinary.  Instead of rough concrete, the surface is actually inlaid with split- or cleft-faced white stone (marble?) strips.  I have never seen anything quite like it.  In areas where the facade has been cleaned, in the sunlight it was really quite brilliant, and with the addition of the public park on the roof of the podium it is easy to access the building for a closer look.

Let's take a look inside city hall!  I loved the big, wooden doors.  The wood hardware bends slightly out away from the door to signify "pull" and slightly in toward the door to signify "push."  Nice design!

Just inside the doorway is a really cool sculpture on the wall...

...made of nails!

Revell died before the building was completed.  He is commemorated on a column just inside the doors of city hall.  Notice the floor, which has white stone strips laid into the terrazzo, similar to the exterior of the towers.

The council chamber sits atop a pedestal that skewers the podium and goes clean down into the floor surrounded by lights and a little amphitheater with flags and commemorative plaques.  The clerestory surrounding the council chamber lets natural light into the podium and allows the chamber and its pedestal to "float" within the composition of the podium.

I love when architecture is so iconic that it becomes a logo!  (Like Oscar Niemeyer's Chapel of St. Francis which we saw on logos all across Belo Horizonte during our trip to Brazil this past summer.)  This photo was of the sign to the roof garden of city hall, but the logo is really everywhere, including trash cans all across the city.

Continuing my jaunt north, I walked up to the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) which features an addition and facade renovation by native Torontonian, Frank Gehry.  The expansion opened in 2008 and is Gehry's first project in Canada.

The new facade of the AGO is a sleek, curved glass facade supported on curved wood beams.  It reminds me of Gehry's early explorations of fish in both sculpture and architecture.  It is quite restrained for a Gehry, which is entirely appropriate for the context.  I really appreciate its subdued and elegant forms.

Each end of the block-long facade flips up in a...fish tail?  Or is it a billboard?  (What would Venturi do with this Duck-cum-Decorated Shed!?)

Looking up at the backside of the extended facade, including the wood beams.

Behind the AGO is another component of the Gehry addition:  a bright blue titanium box with a squiggly stair.  Blue titanium and squiggly design elements.  Now we're talkin' Gehry!

A closer view of the spiral staircase.

Next stop, Will Alsop's Sharp Center for Design, adjacent to the AGO from 2004.  Though I think the idea of the floating box up on stilts is interesting, I find the black and white metal skin and multi-colored pencil-columns a bit inelegant and childish.  Less would have been more here.

I had to catch one more new piece of architecture on my little tour, so at the far north end of downtown, I went to see Daniel Libeskind's 2007 addition to the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM).

Libeskind's work has never really been my thing, but I had to see it since I was so close.  The form is a bit jumbled for my taste, and I had to work really hard to figure out how to open the doors (unlike Revell's city hall).

I believe they call this addition "the crystal"...

...but it appears somewhat parasitic.

Meanwhile, back at the expo, one booth had a chair made out of full-size and half-size rolled drawing sets and three strap clamps.  Simple.  Elegant.  Cool.

And since we're talking Toronto here, there is always the requisite (parting) shot of the CN Tower, former tallest freestanding structure in the world.

Inhotim

Last Sunday before leaving Belo Horizonte, we took a day trip to Inhotim, a stunning garden and contemporary art center about and hour-and-a-half away from the center of BH ("bay-aGAH") in the campo of Minas Gerais. The immaculate and extensive grounds house 17 gallery situated pavilions among lakes, lawns, and spectacular tropical landscaping.

I enjoyed the art to be sure. There was the Forty Part Motet, probably my favorite piece, which put a classical piece of music written in the 16th century for 40 voices in 40 different speakers arranged throughout a large room. It was pretty neat to walk around the room and be able to listen to each individual voice, then step to the center and hear the piece move back and forth all around you. Then there was Através, a study in barriers and transparency, where you walked around on broken glass--but only if you were not wearing sandals! And Celacanto Provoca Maremoto, a larger-than life version of traditional Portuguese azulejos, which I loved because it seemed so very Brazilian to me. Perhaps the most architectural of the art pieces was Invenção da cor, Penetrável Magic Square # 5, De Luxe, which was very much in the spirit of Latin American architecture, including the work of Mexican Modernist Luis Barragán.

But as an architect, I was also taken by the design of some of the galleries in the great spirit and legacy of Brazilian Modernism and the Burle-Marx-esque landscaping. It was really a spectacular day and a great visit to a stunning location.

Caught in the act! The architect taking pictures of an infinity-edge pool!

The main reception pavilion across one of the several lakes. The mountains in the background were really lovely.

This was my favorite of the galleries architecturally speaking (though it also contained one of my favorite pieces too, the one of the giant azulejos).

You entered the gallery across a causeway of sorts though a deep-blue-gree reflecting pool with a thin infinity edge.

After entering underneath the cubic gallery and seeing the artwork in a large, windowless room, a long ramp leads up to the rooftop for a great view of the surrounding landscape...

...then you exit across a metal-mesh bridge out of the opposite side of the gallery from which you entered.

This pavilion was pretty cool, too, with a sinuous bridge a la classic Brazilian Modernism.

The lake in front of this gallery had a much different feel than the reflecting pool in front of the other gallery. The appearance was more natural, but knowing a bit about landscape architecture, even the most "natural" of planned landscapes are planned just the same.

The education center had a really awesome water garden on the roof, with a number of different planting areas including some grasses and, one of my favorite, papyrus.

We ate at this restaurant, which had a series of really cool movable sunshades along the perimeter.

Some of the varied landscape around the grounds, featuring lush tropical vegetation.

Even some of the plants were architectural! I stepped underneath this grove and looked up thinking it was like the fan vaults of some great cathedral.

This was perhaps the most architectural of the exterior artworks, with bright colors and bold shapes. Very Latin America.

The pathways were made of huge irregularly-shaped stone pavers. The grass areas and lawns were immaculate.

A photograph up into a great grove of eucalyptus trees. I really love eucalyptus trees, which remind me of South America. Eucalyptus is found in Curitiba, and also where I was in Peru in February.

I know the photo is blurry, but there is just something about the colors of the houses and the color of the light at sunset in South America. This was taken from the bus on the way back from Inhotim to Belo Horizonte.