Oscar Niemeyer

Oscar Niemeyer (1907-2012) was a Brazilian architect, born in Rio de Janeiro. He graduated from the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio in 1934 and worked under Lúcio Costa. From 1939 he took a leading role in designing the Ministry of Education and Health building in Rio (completed 1943), developing a scheme by Le Corbusier. He was still working past the age of 100.

Niemeyer used reinforced concrete in curved forms and wrote that he was drawn to free-flowing curves rather than right angles and straight lines. For the mayor Juscelino Kubitschek he designed the Pampulha complex in Belo Horizonte (1940-1943), including the Church of Saint Francis of Assisi, roofed with a row of parabolic concrete vaults. After Kubitschek became president, Niemeyer designed the main buildings of Brasília, the new capital planned by Costa and inaugurated in 1960. They include the National Congress, with a dome and an inverted dome beside twin office towers; the Palácio da Alvorada; and the Cathedral of Brasília (1970), built of 16 curved concrete columns.

He served on the international team that designed the United Nations Headquarters in New York in 1947. After the 1964 military coup he worked mainly abroad, based in Paris, until 1985. Later works include the Niterói Contemporary Art Museum (1996), a saucer-shaped gallery on a cliff above Guanabara Bay. He shared the 1988 Pritzker Prize with Gordon Bunshaft.