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Commissioned in 1936 to design a building for Brazil's Ministry of Education, Architect Costa summoned Le Corbusier from France, surrounded "the greatest man in modern architecture" with a group of students who have since become Brazil's best. Among them: Afonso (Museum of Modern Art) Reidy, Jorge (University City) Moreira, Niemeyer. Then Costa pulled out of the project after a series of disagreements. The others elected Novice Niemeyer as their leader, and their building, faced with blue, louver-like sun-breakers, became a famed architectural milestone.
Niemeyer's first major project of his own was commissioned by the man who was then mayor of Belo Horizonte, Juscelino Kubitschek. The project: Pampulha, a new suburb for Belo Horizonte (pop. 600,000). Says Niemeyer: "Juscelino was a perfect client. He told me what he wanted and gave me complete artistic liberty to carry it out." Projecting Le Corbusier's ideas, Niemeyer combined respect for Brazil's climate, terrain and Latin tempo with his own love for the freeflow form. The curving, tiled lines of the restaurant, the soaring yacht club and casino, the many-arched Church of St. Francis were more sinuous and sensuous than any of the master's projects. "For five years after Le Corbusier's visit we followed him faithfully," said Niemeyer. "It was with Pampulha that we began to act more freely and Brazilian architecture began to develop on its own."
Busy Maturity. Since Pampulha, Niemeyer has designed monuments and museums, schools and service stations, weekend cottages and water towers, arenas and airports, apartment houses and factories. In scale he ranges from Brasilia's tiny Dom Bosco roadside shrine to the huge Quintadinha project for Petropolis: a vast, curved apartment house 33 stories high and 1,380 ft. long, designed to house 5,700 families. With Costa he sketched the 1939 New York World's Fair Brazilian Pavilion. He became Brazil's delegate to the U.N.'s architectural board, designed a sector of West Berlin and a suburb of Havana.
Perhaps too facile, he has whisked off a skyscraper design overnight, took only 15 days to plan Caracas' Museum of Modern Art, a pyramid that will rest upside down atop Bello Monte mountain. "I study the problem, the arc of the sun, the lay of the land," he said. "Then I mull over it for a couple of days. Finally the idea comes." One result of such fast work: dwellers sometimes complain about the lack of closets or kitchen windows in Niemeyer houses; builders sweat over specifications that often make light of construction problems. At Brasilia the builder of the Palace of the Dawn reported that each V-shaped pillar "took two weeks to frame and pour, another two weeks to face with small stone squares as specified." But, he added: "It turned out very pretty."
President Kubitschek wanted Niemeyer to design Brasilia alone. But Niemeyer staged a public competition for the pilot plan, was jubilant when the winning entry—a city plan that from above looks like an airplane—was submitted by his old teacher, Lucio Costa. Said his former pupil: "Costa set high standards and we will keep to them."