Obituary: Niemeyer, modernist architect - FT.com Widely regarded as the leading South American architect of the 20th century, Oscar Niemeyer, who has died at the age of 104, was first catapulted into the international limelight in the 1950s by his designs for the main public buildings of Brasília. His use of reinforced concrete often verged on the futuristic and his buildings in many cases came to resemble sculptures. Although it was his designs for Brasília, the brand new capital of his native Brazil, that first brought Niemeyer renown, his ideas were later transformed into structures across the world. IN Obituaries He had what he considered to be a uniquely Brazilian aesthetic, absorbed from the natural features of the countryside. His designs were both "emotional" and unrestrained. He wrote that: "The straight line, hard, inflexible, created by man does not attract me. What does draw me is the free and sensual curve that I find in the mountains of my country, the sinuousness of her rivers, in the clouds of her sky and the waves of the sea. The whole universe is made of the curve. Though his designs were largely praised domestically, Niemeyer's inventiveness was not universally well received. In particular, criticism was levelled at him for being excessively concerned with the forms rather than functionality of his structures. Many of his government buildings, for example, were uncomfortable to work in and the placement of their windows made them function like vast saunas in the sunlight. His excessively curvaceous designs put stress on the materials, which need constant repairs. Yet during his long life he became a symbol of his country. Many shared his view that his works represented nothing less than a belief in Brazil's future. Oscar Niemeyer Soares Filho was born in Rio de Janeiro to a well-to-do family in 1907. At an early age he found he received top marks for his drawings of coffee pots, cups and figurines. This evolved into a skill for turning almost childlike sketches of his ideas into architectural reality. His strong political views were also formed early in life. Even as a child he felt disgust at the way his family's servants were sometimes treated and at the social divisions that scarred Brazilian society. This eventually led to his lifetime membership of the Communist party. Until his marriage to Annita Baldo, the daughter of Italian immigrants, Niemeyer lived a bohemian life with no very clear idea of what he wanted to do. But his marriage gave him his first sense of real responsibility and he enrolled in the School of Fine Arts in Rio. After a protracted education there, which was marked by political activism and student strikes, Niemeyer joined the architectural office of Lucio Costa in 1934. Costa's neocolonial style had defined the theoretical parameters of Brazilian architecture from the 1920s. However, he was also able to apply traditional construction, Brazilian Baroque and modernist techniques to his works and Niemeyer learnt to appreciate a variety of styles from a distinguished thinker. Niemeyer, in addition to Costa, who was later to plan the city layout of Brasília, was much influenced by Le Corbusier, the world-renowned Swiss-born architect who tried to derive a bold new architecture out of reinforced concrete for the industrial age. The Corbusian style is particularly evident in the early works of Niemeyer and they were to work together on the modernist design for the Ministry of Education and Health in 1937 in Rio and later in 1947 on the UN headquarters building in New York. However, Niemeyer refined the Corbusian style with a series of innovations and developed a distinct style of his own. ©Eyevine Brasilia, designed by architect Oscar Niemeyer, was a city built in record time, less then 4 years, in the late 1950s. The city fulfilled a long held Brazilian dream to have a new capital in the heart of the country In the 1940s Niemeyer was commissioned by Juscelino Kubitschek, the future president of Brazil, to design a new upper class leisure complex in the suburb of Belo Horizonte. It was in this period that Kubitschek and Niemeyer formed a strong friendship and the unusual character of Niemeyer's work became apparent in his design of the church of Sao Francisco de Assisi in 1943. He developed here his outspoken love for the free-form curve, rejecting right-angled simplicity and the merely functional aspects of buildings. In 1956, Kubitschek's leadership of Brazil was inaugurated following the suicide of the former president Getulio Vargas in 1954. He began an intense period of industrialisation and modernisation which saw the building of Brasília, under the motto of "50 years in five." Kubitschek's fanatical determination to build what he called "the most beautiful capital in the world," led him back to Niemeyer. The aim was to build a capital that would symbolise the future and open up the centre of the country. By 1957, work had already begun in an area that Niemeyer described as a "huge and dismal patch of wilderness." The work was completed in three years at tremendous expense. Niemeyer accepted civil employee wages and life in a zinc cabin in return for the chance to design buildings of reinforced concrete on a scale that has never been equalled. In all, he designed five palaces and a magnificent cathedral. The finished products were made to shock. He produced something that was unprecedented whose sculptured forms would, he hoped, contribute to a new sense of collective identity and hope for his people. His cathedral, for instance, was a circular concrete-framed building made of glass. Its structure resembled a crown of thorns with a subterranean entrance passage. Its spectacularly light interior contrasted sharply with the darkness of other cathedrals of the gothic or modern era. His national congress building too, was built with two vast bowls on its roof, one of which is turned upside down. Niemeyer's vision that Brasília should be built for "free, fortunate men without racial or social discrimination" was however, not realised. Through his design of simple low-rise housing blocks, he hoped to produce a non-hierarchical civic life. However, the camaraderie that had characterised the relationship of those who had built the city was soon lost as it began its civil life. Kubitschek, whose fiscal policy had become increasingly irresponsible - annual inflation was above 30 per cent - left office in 1961. Three years later the military seized power and Niemeyer exiled himself to France. His political affiliations made it dangerous to continue living in Brazil and his work began to be rejected. Many who fought the dictatorship were tortured and killed. Abroad, he began another productive phase of his career, designing some of his favourite buildings such as the Communist party headquarters in Paris and the Mondadori building in Milan. After further spells in Algeria and Italy, he returned to Brazil where he began a further series of buildings, which reflected his utopian vision for Latin America. This period saw the construction of his Samba stadium and a state school in Rio. He went on to add to the numerous awards he had won for his works, most notably the Pritzker prize in Chicago in 1988. Niemeyer held that "to believe in architecture" was to "believe in beauty." He loved his work and continued to put in long hours in his office at Copacabana beach into his 90s. Though he lamented the fall of communism, believing that it signified a demise of hope "for the common man," his architecture distracted him, even into his old age, from his political disappointments. This article has been amended to reflect earlier reader comments