Wednesday, December 05, 2012

My hit has a first name, it's O-S-C-A-R...

(Tip o’ the cap to Mark)
Oscar Niemeyer, who brought The Jetsons to the jungle, has died of a respiratory infection at the age of 103. A student of the French architect Le Corbusier, he developed a distinctive modernist style typified by sweeping curves, which he claimed were inspired by the women on Brazil’s beaches, and stark concrete, which was apparently inspired by the pasty tourists on Brazil’s beaches. His work suggested Brazil’s hedonism with curves reminiscent of a samba dancer, including the Saint Francis of Assisi church, which boasted sensuous lines that offended a Catholic Church more attuned to the sensuality of straight lines and cowering choirboys and was refused consecration for more than a decade. An avowed Communist, Cold War politics kept him out of the United States for most of his career, though fittingly enough he did collaborate again with his mentor Le Corbusier in designing the United Nations complex in Manhattan. His crowning achievement was Brasilia, the national capital of Brazil. Like Walt Disney building his modern playground in the Orlando swamps, Niemeyer broke from the nation’s colonial past and built his own Tomorrowland in the woods. The abstract forms, most notably a circular, crownlike church that splays open at the top to let light into the main sanctuary, took on added grandeur in their isolation. When political dysfunction led to a military coup, the capital’s empty spaces and slums surrounding the sleek, enormous government structures reminded people that Modernist architecture was just a way of designing buildings and not a promise of a utopian future. Among the more than 600 expensive, impractical, overly decorous monstrosities he added to the world’s skylines are the Niemeyer Foundation building near Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paolo’s Anhembi Sambadrome and the Communist Party headquarters in Paris.

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