He used to claim he took architecture up as a sport, the way a man might take up soccer. Since his taking on the job of architect for Brasília he has sobered considerably. He even recently admitted in one of his rare public statements that this heavy responsibility had made him understand that the time had come to give up some of the freakish and playful experiments — Bohemianism, he called them — of his early work. Now he must pay more attention to construction.
Like most people who do first rate work in the arts Niemeyer thinks, feels and lives entirely in the terms of his craft. He likes to live well but he doesn’t care for money. About politics he is disconcertingly naïve. Though he claims to be a Communist and contributes to the Party war chest he designs churches and yachtclubs and gambling casinos with as much enthusiasm as he does workers’ apartments. His last work in Rio before leaving for Brasília was to finish the maquette for the crownshaped structure in glass and stressed concrete he planned for a national cathedral.
His domestic life is that of a middleclass Brazilian. He’s sluggish about many practical things. Like Parisians and Manhattanites, the Cariocas — as the people of Rio call themselves — can’t imagine living anywhere else than in their beautifully situated, overcrowded city. Niemeyer has the typical Carioca’s dread of travel. During his last days in Rio he seemed to be thinking more about how much he hated to leave his family and the pleasant dwelling he designed for himself, in the mountain valley high above one of Rio’s most beautiful stretches of coast, than about the glorious opportunities the Brasília project offered him as an architect. He cried out how hard it would be not to see his grandchild every day.
He has a horror of airplanes. The six hundred and fifty miles between Rio and Brasília will be a tough trek by car until the new road is finished. Once he tears himself away from Rio and settles in Brasília he seems to expect to stay there for the full two years. Did I think he’d be lonesome, he asked wistfully.
City Planner
Niemeyer would be the first to tell you that he considers it highly fitting that he will be working within the limits of Lucio Costa’s city plan because he considers Lucio Costa more than any other man to be the inspirer and initiator of the modern movement in Brazilian architecture.
Lucio Costa shuns publicity and public statements as much as Niemeyer does. He is so selfeffacing that he sometimes avoids taking credit for his own work. All the public ever sees or hears of him is an occasional glimpse of his aquiline profile and bushy mustache lurking in the background of a photograph of some group of architects.
It was through Lucio Costa that this whole generation of Brazilian architects was brought into contact with the stimulating European work of the twenties. Coming from a family prominent in the government and in the armed services, he had the European upbringing of the wealthy Brazilians of the period before the wars. His father was a naval officer and eventually an admiral. Born in Toulon, Costa learned to read in London and attended a Swiss boarding school. The Europe he was brought up in teemed with revolutionary ideas in the arts.
Costa’s attitude is that of the gifted amateur. As a boy he developed a taste for painting watercolors. In his teens he turned up in Rio to study design at the School of Fine Arts. There his interest in colonial architecture earned him the friendship of another talented and selfeffacing Brazilian, the Melo Franco de Andrade who devoted his life to the protection and restoration of Brazil’s rich heritage of baroque architecture. It was as a restorer of ancient monuments that Lucio Costa first took up architectural work. His early house plans were in the neocolonial style.
When Le Corbusier, the French theorist of glass and steel construction, first visited Brazil in 1929, Lucio Costa had prepared the way for him. He had already been telling the young architects about his work and the work of Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright and of the Italian futurists. They streamed out from the Frenchman’s lectures dizzy with the “functional” use of the new materials: concrete and steel and tile and glass. Already a Polish settler named Warschavchik had been designing dwellings in “functional” concrete for wealthy business men in São Paulo. The new architecture took root.
By the time Le Corbusier returned to Brazil for a second visit a dozen talented young draftsmen were ready to call him master. Niemeyer had become Lucio Costa’s intimate friend and collaborator. With Le Corbusier’s advice the two of them launched their first great project: the Ministry of Education and Health in Rio.
Lucio Costa was the first chairman of the board that worked out the plans. Characteristically Costa retired in time to let the spotlight fall on his protégé Niemeyer as chief designer of that highly successful construction. Again when the Brazilian pavilion for the New York World’s Fair in 1939 had to be designed, although Costa won the competition he claimed that Niemeyer’s entry was better than his own and in the end the two men collaborated on the final plan.
The design which Kubitschek commissioned for Pampulha was Niemeyer’s first job entirely on his own. He threw his cap over the windmill and developed a startlingly original style. Where Le Corbusier’s and Lucio Costa’s work had tended to straight lines and severe planes, Niemeyer was experimenting with the curves and swelling abstract forms of contemporary sculpture. When as President Kubitschek decided to stake his political future on the Brasília project he told Niemeyer he wanted him to design the new capital, all of it.
The Case Against
Like the wiseacres who raged against Belo Horizonte fifty years ago wellinformed people in Rio and São Paulo will prove to you with paper and pencil that the Brasília project is bound to fail. The Cariocas resent the loss of their capital. The whole scheme, they’ll tell you, was cooked up to enrich the State of Minas Gerais and its politicians. A gigantic real estate speculation at the expense of the Brazilian economy. The city, they claim, will turn out another grandiose failure like the group of watertowers in decorative ironwork in the style of the Eiffel Tower a mayor of Belém in Pará bought at a Paris world’s fair and set up in the center of the old tropical capital. From that day to this nobody has found any way to connect it to the city’s water system.
They point out that the Pampulha project was a financial failure. A federal law against gambling put the casino out of business. Snails in the lake threatened the residents with schistosomiasis. The bishop refused to consecrate Niemeyer’s gay little blue and white church. In the end a flood came which washed out the dam and left Niemeyer’s famous yacht-club high and dry.
President Kubitschek’s career, his opponents will tell you, has been littered with these unfinished enterprises. The municipal theater at Belo Horizonte was never completed. When Kubitschek left the governorship the building was invaded by squatters and became a slum. Brasília, editorial writers on the Rio newspapers were insisting, would turn out to be a desert favela on a colossal scale.
Why wasn’t the money spent for schools to combat Brazil’s seventy per cent illiteracy, or to start new industries or to stabilize finances, they ask. With the country swept by a ruinous inflation, they tell you, the last thing Brazil needs is the upkeep of a capital five hundred miles from nowhere.
Everything was being done backwards, they said. Instead of first building a presidential palace why didn’t they spend the money on a new railroad? The steel girders that had to be bought in the States were unloaded at Rio, shipped up to Belo Horizonte on the regular gauge railroad, then transferred to the narrow gauge that took them to Anápolis. In Anápolis they were hoisted onto trucks and driven by road to Brasília. Many materials and even drums of gasoline were flown in by air.