Our critic salutes Oscar Niemeyer, the visionary Brazilian architect who died last week, aged 104
Oscar Niemeyer was brilliant, energetic, ruthless, by all accounts charming – and extraordinarily long-lived. He died last week aged 104, a bridge across time to the now-historic modern movement in architecture. He was the master of the curve, the architect who could command tonnes of concrete and steel to swoop and turn with a few strokes of his pencil. He brought movement to modern architecture, and invented a version of it that was expressive and seductive, clearly not functional, and clearly different from the Germanic glass box of the Bauhaus. According to Norman Foster, the city of Brasilia, for which Niemeyer designed the most significant monuments, "is not simply designed, it is choreographed".
He was the first modern architect from a country outside Europe or North America to achieve global fame. More than anyone else, including his architectural colleagues such as Lúcio Costa, he shaped the modern image of his country, Brazil. The twin towers and upside-down dome of the National Congress in Brasilia, and its crown-shaped cathedral, telegraphed into black-and-white newspapers in faraway countries, were updated versions of the White House and Capitol in Washington: white monuments of a new democracy. It was an extraordinary achievement, to endow this new-made city with instant, and potent, mythology.
As an image-maker of genius, he came with the common downside of sometimes sacrificing use to look. His Museum of Contemporary Art in Niterói, a flying saucer on a stalk outside Rio, has some of the worst spaces ever conceived – all sloping walls and curves and glass in the wrong places – for showing art. "It's that dumb arse Niemeyer," says a character in one of Regina Rheda's short stories about his huge Copan apartment building in São Paulo, "like everything he did, it's good for taking pictures, but lousy to live in."
Having stayed in the Copan myself, I can testify that its brise-soleil – the screen of horizontal concrete sunshades that adds greatly to its external dynamism – comes at some cost to the flats inside. You have to peer at the view past thick concrete, which is not completely efficient in keeping out the sun. But everything else about the building is so splendid that you forgive it.
He attracted cliches, some self-generated, such as the over-repeated observation that his curves were inspired by his country's mountains and women, promoting a lazy view of Brazil as the land of girls from Ipanema with perfect buttocks. In the last 20 years a revival of interest in Niemeyer's work has given other architects licence to think they can make their buildings swing like a samba, and usually they can't.
But he was far more than an image-maker. He was capable of structural daring, with the fullness of his buildings' curves balanced by the impossible lightness with which they sometimes touch the ground. They are magnificent and playful. They are spatially rich, and responsive to their locations. In Brasilia, where guards in archaic uniforms stand by his inverted paraboloid arches, he pulled off an improbable combination of ceremony and futurism. In rural sites he built villas that let the landscape and vegetation flow through them. In São Paulo he built robust blocks that hold their own in a tough-minded business city. During his exile, after a military dictatorship took power in Brazil, he built convincing works in places including Paris, Milan and Lebanon.
His choreography is not just of shapes, but of the movement of people through them. In his best works you are asked not just to gawp at his inventions, but to interact with them, to take part in a play of architectural and human motion. In the Ibirapuera exhibition building in São Paulo, sinuous ramps take crowds up and down its central hall in a great architectural promenade., and one of his nicest small moments is a broad spiral staircase without balustrade or apparent means of support at the Itamaraty palace in Brasilia, which makes something unforgettable out of the act of going from one floor to another.
The Itamaraty is essentially a large entertainment zone at the service of the government, and Niemeyer was his best in making spaces for events. His own villa in Rio, a sinuous glass-walled pavilion set in a lush garden, makes perfect sense as a party space, and less so as home - the living spaces, stowed underneath, are uninspired.
All that British audiences got to see of him was his temporary pavilion for the Serpentine Gallery in 2003. Designed remotely, as by then he had given up long-distance travel, it was not in truth his most memorable creation, but it still gave a glimpse of a remarkable man. He was definitely one of the greats.