Oscar Niemeyer, one of the greatest architects of the 20th century and patriarch of Brazilian design has died at the age of 104, just ten days before his 105th birthday. He still had projects on the drawing board right up to his death, and had just released a collection with American shoe designer Converse. With a career spanning over half a century, Niemeyer won the 1988 Pritzker Architecture Prize, considered the “Nobel Prize of Architecture” for the Brasilia cathedral.
Read an obituary by Jonathan Glancey on BDOnline and also take a look at a roundup of his best projects by moi here. Below is a little selection of the 10 projects on Building Design:
This €5 million building was completed when Niemeyer turned the landmark age of 100. The Teatro consists of 1000 sqm of indoor space, with a 350 seat auditorium and a 17,000 sqm plaza. A glass wall looks over Guanabara Bay, while large panels of yellow tiles cover the sides of the structure. According to Niemeyer, the yellow facades and green walls are homage to Brazil’s flag.
The Mondadori publishing group headquarters is situated on the outskirts of Milan in the town of Segrate, near to the city’s Linate airport and the motorway to Verona. Niemeyer was commissioned after recommendations from the Foreign Ministry he designed in Brasilia. Construction began in the autumn of 1970 and finished in 1974. The building consists of a series of tall asymmetrical arches, positioned by a lake of 20,000 metres.
This was Niemeyer’s first great masterpiece. It is also a project on which he met Le Corbusier for the first time (the design team was made up of Brazilian architects, with Le Corbusier as a consultant and Niemeyer as lead architect). The Ministry of Education and Health building itself consists of a fifteen-storey office tower with a lower unit below containing an amphitheatre and exhibition hall. The walls of the lower building are covered with specially designed blue and white ceramic tiles, and on the base of the west facade there is a mural designed by Candido Portinari. In 1943 the New York Times declared the lower building, named the mes, “the most advanced architectural structure in the world”. In 1947, L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui devoted six pages to the mes in a special issue on new architecture in Brazil.
