Two years ago a brilliant Brazilian architect took on one of the world's most exciting assignments in art: to design the palaces, public buildings, courthouses, churches—even the yacht club—of a whole new city that will house 500,000 people. Now Brasilia, the great new inland national capital, is bustling toward completion, much to the pride and satisfaction of Architect Oscar Niemeyer.
In a country alive with spectacular and imaginative new architecture, the work of Oscar Niemeyer (see color pages) ranks at the top. One day in 1956 Niemeyer went riding with his longtime friend, President Juscelino Kubitschek, who told him his dream of Brasilia and casually added: "I want you to design it." Niemeyer has since turned down a fortune in fees to become the $300-a-month head of the Department of Architecture and Urbanization of Novacap (a coined word meaning "new capital") Last week, with Kubitschek already installed in the nearly finished Palace of the Dawn, Architect Niemeyer moved wife, draftsmen and baggage to Brasilia to live there and carry on the job.
Driving Dreamer. He left behind the comfort of a house south of Rio that is itself an architectural showplace, with curves flowing gracefully into the hills above the Atlantic. But in translating Kubitschek's dream into Brasilia's buildings, Niemeyer, once an easygoing bohemian, turned into a single-minded driver. Says he: "Until Brasilia, I regarded architecture as an exercise to be practiced in a sporting spirit and nothing more. Now I live for Brasilia."
Oscar Niemeyer, 50, is a dreamer, shy but self-assured about his art. He hates to be alone, yet is rarely at ease in society.
He dislikes earning juicy fees for buildings that he deems antisocial or commercial. Like Le Corbusier, Picasso and many another artist, he calls himself a Communist, did not switch even after Hungary, because "we are too old to change." But he insists that he limits his Communist activity to donations to the party, prefers novels (favorite: Jean-Paul Sartre) to Marx, takes little interest in politics, and remains a close friend of anti-Red President Kubitschek.
Lazy Youth. As an architect, Niemeyer was a late starter. He barely squeaked through high school, then drifted ("I just liked to draw") until he was 19. One day he dropped his shyness long enough to go right up to a pretty girl in the street and ask for a date. Recalls his wife, Ana Lisa: "I was waiting for a trolley. It was really all a surprise." The fact that his future father-in-law was a contractor gave Niemeyer the idea of entering architecture school, but he did not have the necessary credits. So, he says, "I played soccer, went fishing and swimming, learned jujitsu." At 22, with daughter Ana Maria about to be born, he got admitted to Rio's Escola de Bellas Artes, dropped out a couple of times, managed to end up with a degree. Then he went to work for the man who did most to get Brazil's great modern architecture movement into full swing—Lúcio Costa.