April 5, 2013 |
When I was a child I wanted very badly to live in the future. My ideas of exactly what that would involve owed a great deal to the science-fiction movies that I watched avidly, aged eight or nine. This was back in the 1970s, before multichannel TV. Science fiction was fringe, cultist stuff and the television stations treated it as such, shoving SF movies to the far corners of the schedule.
I’d scour the newspaper listings by day and then stay up late into the night, alone in the living room when my parents thought I was in bed, hungry for a glimpse of tomorrow. I yearned especially for physical expressions of the future. Flying cars and spaceships, yes. But chiefly buildings and cities. Those desires were spurred in part by a dawning consciousness of the supreme blandness of my suburban home town. But at the very simplest I had the presumption, shared by all children, that the real world should be as rich with wonder and excitement as the interior life of my imagination. The future cities I saw in movies fulfilled some of that expectation.
Here and there I’d seen clips of Metropolis and Things to Come, two early black and white movies that featured heartbreakingly fragile and beautiful cityscapes, all glass spires and aerial walkways. The flicker and grain of aged film stock lent an added authenticity to such images, as if these were pictures beamed directly back from the future.
Unfortunately few 1970s movies lived up to the standard set by those earlier works. Most SF films of the period were low-budget affairs, and this being a time pre-CGI, they lacked the means to conjure convincing urban panoramas in the way that, say, Blade Runner would in the following decade.
You took what you could get. A geodesic dome in Logan’s Run. A suspended monorail in Fahrenheit 451. The nightmarish house in Demon Seed, run by a sexually predatory computer with amorous designs on Julie Christie. As a consequence of that unbalanced diet, it took me a long time to realise that the vision of tomorrow that had formed in my head was based firmly on the past. As Metropolis evidences, the biggest influence on futuristic imagery, pre-CGI, was the modernist architecture of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright, with its clean lines and right angles, its faith in order and rationality, and its iron conviction that you could build your way to a better tomorrow.
Captivated at an early age by such imagery, it’s likely that I might have grown up convinced that progress could only be delivered in straight lines, that power could only be conveyed in steel and glass, if I hadn’t discovered the architecture of Oscar Niemeyer.
As it happens, the first time I came across his work was as a teenager, watching another 1970s SF film late one night. Norman Jewison’s Rollerball is set in a decadent future society whose chief entertainment is an ultra-violent sport where injury and death are commonplace. Flicking around the channels, I came to the movie at a scene shot outside a lean, angular building, capped by two domes on the roof, one facing down, the other inverted skyward like a giant saucer. The dimensions of the domes played havoc with the otherwise-ordered proportions of the building. But they also brought it to life in a way that overshadowed the scene taking place foreground, in which actors with flicked hair and flares were pretending to be from the 21st century with only sporadic levels of success. In comparison to any acting that was taking place, the building was the most compelling presence on the screen.
For years afterward it stayed with me, even as I argued with myself over whether it was real or just a matt backdrop painted onto a set as a giddy evocation of a future society loosed from morality, unmoored from rationality.
Over time I came to discover that it was indeed real and that it was the home of the National Congress of Brazil, as built by Oscar Niemeyer in Brasilia, in 1960. And I also decided that the best way to satisfy a fascination with the future that has never dimmed since childhood was to find out more about Niemeyer himself.
Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1907, Niemeyer was a peer of, and on a par with, the modernist masters of the 20th century. But there are two crucial differences that set him apart from the likes of Mies and Le Corbusier.
The first is that, at the age of 104, he is still alive and still working, clocking every day into his 10th-floor penthouse office, with its views over Copacabana beach and the ocean beyond. The other is that they looked for inspiration to the man-made and mass-produced – to steamships and motorcars, grain elevators and steel factories – in order to create what Le Corbusier described as “machines for living”. By contrast, Niemeyer, whose faith in the Utopian function of architecture remains at the core of his work, is a sensualist. Above his office desk is a poster of a naked woman and, as the architect himself once wrote, what inspires him most is not the “straight line, hard and inflexible, created by man” but “the free-flowing sensual curves” found in Brazil’s mountains and rivers “and in the body of the beloved woman”.
By comparison with the modernist dictum in architecture that “form follows function”, Niemeyer has opted for his own version: “Form follows feminine.”
In a career that began in the 1930s, he has created more than 800 buildings, among them some of the most audacious and poetic structures ever to rise from the ground courtesy of human design. His chosen material is concrete, and Niemeyer sculpts it like clay, creating soaring shapes crafted out of a woozy defiance of logic and gravity.
Most notable among them are the range of signature buildings he created for Brasilia, Brazil’s capital city, raised from the arid savannah of the country’s vast and underpopulated interior in just four years and completed in 1960. Although he is frequently described as the master planner of the city, it was another architect, Lucio Costa, who conceived its design, with its enormous blocks of government buildings and its broad, straight boulevards, all laid out – if viewed from above – in the shape of a plane. Niemeyer was invited to join the project by Brazil’s President Kubitschek, who was elected to power in 1956, promising to transform the country’s fortunes with a series of grand projects that would deliver “50 years of progress in five”.
At the heart of those plans was Brasilia, a new city that would be as progressive and ordered as Rio was sprawling and idiosyncratic. Brasilia had the potential to be a site of horror, as soulless and barren as any place that begins life, in entirety, on a drawing board. But Niemeyer imbued it with vitality, taking the high seriousness of modernism and adding heart, humour and a profound and serious commitment to values, as he put it, of “surprise and enchantment”.
Among the series of dazzling buildings he created are at least half a dozen widely considered as masterpieces of 20th-century architecture. These include the crown-shaped Cathedral of Brasilia, which has a wondrous vaunted ceiling of stained glass; the Presidential Office, featuring delicate struts propping up its roof and a broad ramp symbolising the ties of government to the people; and the National Congress, a sublime balance of power and beauty. All of these are structures filled with emotion, filled with human hope. Niemeyer is a committed socialist and his buildings are not intended to intimidate with their scale but to be used and enjoyed in the service of the people.
The irony is that, for many years after Brasilia, Niemeyer was shunned by many Western architects as a quasi-totalitarian, fatally consumed by grand statist dreams. Speaking about him in The New York Times a few years ago, Zaha Hadid noted that, “the post-1960s generation was against modern monumentality – all those wide streets for the army to drive through. They didn’t pay enough attention to see that Oscar represented a totally different ideology”.
Ostracised by the architectural establishment, Niemeyer was also exiled from Brazil for two decades following the military coup in 1964.
But throughout that time he continued to design one extraordinary building after another. Attention finally began to shift his way in the 1980s, and in 1988, aged 81, he was presented with the Pritzker Prize, the most prestigious award in architecture. Today, he is possibly the most influential and certainly the most revered of all living architects. It’s easy to see the role he has played in inspiring Hadid’s own swooping concrete structures. Equally, it’s hard to imagine Frank Gehry coming up with boldly sculptural forms such as the Guggenheim Bilbao or LA’s Walt Disney Concert Hall without Niemeyer as a predecessor.
The true joy of Niemeyer’s work today is that it’s not just to be found in Brazil. As a consequence of his exile years, his buildings can be seen around the world, from New York and France to Italy, Algeria, Israel and Abu Dhabi. That seems appropriate. For an architect whose abiding desire is to celebrate life in all its promise, all its “presentness”, his role has also been to shape the dreams of the millions round the world who have encountered his buildings, allowing them to glimpse in concrete the possibility of a better tomorrow.
Text Ekow Eshun
