Oscar Niemeyer, Brazilian master

Oscar Niemeyer died last week at the age of 104, a Brazilian master of modernist architecture famous for his inventive use of concrete and for the architecture of Brasilia.  Type his name into Google these days and you’ll get pages of appreciations of his work.  Here’s a selection – from Wired, from The Guardian includes tributes from a number of architects, a film (1:29 min) on ArchDaily, the one on Curbed includes some of his interiors, and Conde Nast Traveler has a 22-image slideshow.  Another post on The Guardian describes his work:

It is this mischievous sense of fun and delight that will live on in the buildings of Oscar Niemeyer. He brought a much-needed injection of passion and emotion to the monotonous world of modernism, an outlook that lifted the spirits and continues to have a lasting legacy.

As Le Corbusier once told him, in reluctant praise: “Oscar, what you are doing is baroque. But it’s very well done.”

And from Vanity Fair:

His swirling forms and his curving lines replaced modernism’s harshness with softness and ease. Niemeyer didn’t compromise modernism’s utopian ideals, but when filtered through his sensibility, the stern, unforgiving rigor of so much European modernism became as smooth as Brazilian jazz. His work is sensuous, almost hedonistic.