Our fascination this past weekend with images from Brazil has put us in the frame of mind to digest this retrospective, and we highly recommend it to you.

Article: NY Times Magazine - The Last of the Moderns
Link: Slideshow

He is a national hero in Brazil, but elsewhere he may be the least celebrated of the major architects of the modern era. A suave pioneer of curvaceous concrete, toying with the limits of engineering while injecting sex and surrealism into Le Corbusier's famous machine for living, he designed some of the most audacious, sublimely poetic and occasionally goofy buildings of the 20th century. Probably more than anyone else, he brought lyricism and a populist sensibility to modern public architecture.

When Gehry visited, Niemeyer showed him a drawing. "The picture was on his desk," Gehry said. "It was a row of women lying on the beach, alternately chest up, chest down. He told me that explained everything."

(Quoting Niemeyer) "An architect must prepare himself for a world that can be very perverse. We pass through life very quickly, and each one of us writes our little story, which time will erase. Human beings don't have solutions; we have solidarity and friendship."

(Michael Sorkin refering to Niemeyer's former home in Rio) "It's like the Barcelona pavilion on acid."

Niemeyer now deflects criticism of Brasília by stressing that Costa did the master plan. But he says: "You may not like Brasília, but you can't say you have seen anything like it -- you maybe saw something better, but not the same. I prefer Rio, even with the robberies. What can you do? It's the capitalist world. But people who live in Brasília, to my surprise, don't want to leave it. Brasília works. There are problems. But it works. And from my perspective, the ultimate task of the architect is to dream. Otherwise nothing happens."

(Architectural historian Lauro Cavalcanti) "In the end, Oscar represents modernism as a style without the usual ideology."