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Rising on a promontory across the bay from Rio. Oscar Niermeyer's
Museum of Contemporary Art is a commanding prescence.
(Photo by Eric Fredericksen)
| Oscar Niemeyer's Museum of Contemporary Art in Niterói, Brazil,
is a masterpiece of late modernism in a country that never departed
from the style. by Eric Fredericksen On a promontory on Guanabara Bay, facing Rio de Janeiro, rises a dramatic bloom of a building, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Niterói. With its gleaming white concrete surfaces and symmetrical, curving form mushrooming out above the rocky site, it seems like a well-preserved relic of Brazil's Fifties and Sixties boom, an example of optimistic high Modernism. In fact, the museum was completed only last year, the latest work of the venerable Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer. Some visitors are surprised to learn that Niemeyer, who designed the major buildings for Brazil's master-planned capital, Brasília, is still active. His name has certainly fallen out of circulation in America, where he hasn't built anything since he worked with Le Corbusier and Wallace Harrison on the United Nations Headquarters. But Niemeyer is very much alive, and, in his nineties, has completed a building that shows his architectural gifts and his commitment to Modernism to be undimmed by age. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Niemeyer never latched on to newer trends in order to keep his career going. Other than a spell in Europe in the late 1960s while Brazil was under military rule, he has pursued his craft here with little interruption or radical change, melding a personal love for curving forms with a high Modern-ist's belief in progress and liberation through technology. And Niemeyer's Modernism has always been tied to his native country; a formalist, his buildings often refer to the shapes of the Brazilian landscape, especially the curves of Rio's mountains and, he has said, her women. Rio, like Niemeyer, never repudiated Modernism. Though it took until 1930 for the movement to take off in Brazil, it has been the dominant aesthetic ever since. Its capital, built from scratch deep in the country's rural interior, has become an emblem of the style. And as it evolved in relative isolation, Modernism in Brazil took on a distinct and recognizable regionalism. "Every single formal motif [in Brazil] was charged with an emotive significance which enabled it to stand on its own," writes Leonardo Benevola in his 1960 History of Modern Architecture (MIT Press). "Composition became elementary, allusive...while the shape of the whole could be taken in at first glance." When you walk the streets of Rio, you'll see no nonstructural, Post-Modern pilasters and cornices, no "ducks" or decorated sheds, no deconstructed cubes with their insides on the outside. What you will see are gems like A.E. Reidy's Pedregulho residential complex and the sweeping oval of Maracanã Stadium, as well as miles and miles of rectilinear apartment buildings, heavy on majolica tile and glass, steel and stucco, many set high on pilotis. The only pre-Modern buildings much in evidence are churches, though among them are some grand, Modern exceptions like the Metropolitan Cathedral, a stunning if somewhat brutal truncated cone of reinforced concrete. A similar aesthetic, on a much humbler scale, prevails in Niterói, a suburb of Rio connected by a long cantilever bridge. Home to some 500,000 people, it's known for great beaches and beautiful views of Rio, though not much else. In 1991, João Sattamini, a prominent art collector, gave the city a chance to change this. If Niterói would build a suitable venue, he would fill it with his extensive collection of contemporary Brazilian art. "Thinking big," then-mayor Jorge Roberto Silveira later wrote, "we immediately opted for Oscar Niemeyer." After visiting the dramatic site, the architect quickly sketched out the design at a nearby restaurant. "I asked the waiter for a few sheets of paper," Silveira continued. "He was hurrying back with a few message slips when another waiter intercepted him and muttered, 'Bring bigger paper. This is the man who designed Brasília.' " "My design sprang up spontaneously in the earliest sketches," Niemeyer remembered. "A central pillar, with the architecture floating free in space, like a flower." A narrow core set in the middle of a pool of water swoops out and then rises at a 40-degree angle to encompass the museum's offices and galleries. A deep red ramp makes a wide curve up to one floor, then twists around itself to ascend to a second entrance. Under a stone plaza and pool of water are spaces for a restaurant and auditorium. Children fish and swim in the bay below; their laughter can be heard inside the galleries. Set on a high point that extends into the bay, the museum occupies the kind of site normally reserved for lighthouses; though rising only about 50 feet, the museum can be seen from all over Rio's waterfront and from the high mountains that jut up in the middle of the city. And the more one looks at this building, the more grace its flying saucer--like form assumes--particularly in the breathtaking moment when its side lines up with Sugarloaf Mountain, across the bay. By continuing to explore the Modernist aesthetic and refusing to depart from formalism and purity, Oscar Niemeyer has turned himself into an eccentric. But with this quirky, late work, he has created a building that is a beacon and a symbol of civic pride, a late blossom of Modernism. |
Keywords:
Oscar Niemeyer, Brazil
