Architect of Destruction
Oscar Niemeyer’s architectural vision needed the support of authoritarian governments.
By DEMÉTRIO MAGNOLI
This past
Sunday’s New York Times Magazine published a photo essay, accompanied by
a single paragraph of prose by Julie Bosman, as a hagiographic memento for the
late Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer. The photos were all of Niemeyer’s work
in Algeria: four buildings built out of 12 designs approved. Bosman’s paragraph
says that Niemeyer was “a Communist who fled to France following the military
takeover of Brazil in 1964.” The passing mention of Niemeyer’s communism seems
somehow to suggest that this was a badge of honor, albeit one that has nothing
to do with his architectural style. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
In a 1920
documentary one can see Le Corbusier rubbing a thick black pencil over a wide
area of the map of
central Paris “with the enthusiasm of Bomber Harris planning the annihilation
of a German city in World War II”, wrote Theodore Dalrymple in a tasty article for City
Journal. The celebrated architect, founder of the Congrès International
d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), was busy designing a delusional, totalitarian
fantasy: the Plan Voisin, a geometric collection of 18 cruciform towers of
offices sixty-stories high supplemented by series of residential buildings
outlining superblocks. That’s Niemeyer’s achitectural template. His communism
was most certainly not incidental to his style.
The Cathedral of Brasilia, as seen from inside.
Taste is just
taste, of course. You might like the Capanema Palace in Rio de Janeiro, a 1936
Niemeyer design based on a sketch by Le Corbusier (I do like it, in fact). You
might like the Cathedral of Brasilia (I love it), built in 1958, or the
Itamaraty Palace (it’s gorgeous), the headquarters of the Foreign Ministry
erected in Brasilia in 1960. You might even like the sumptuous headquarters of
the French Communist Party in Paris (I do not), or the hideous Latin America
Memorial in São Paulo, or the ridiculous Contemporary Arts Museum in Niteroi.
But like or dislike, love or hate, there is no intellectual justification for
separating the oeuvre of Oscar Niemeyer from its doctrinal roots. Niemeyer is
an heir of the Le Corbusier matrix, the founding father of an architecture of
destruction wholly devoted to the aesthetic of power and to hatred for history,
living public spaces and, above all, common people.
Niemeyer was
certainly no naive epigone of Le Corbusier, with “big boxes on sticks” (Frank
Lloyd Wright), that were “a common hallmark of the modern form” (Lewis
Mumford). This Brazilian was an inventor: His contours sinuously curved the
masses of concrete, giving a tropical identity to modern architecture. But look
again to the photos reproduced in The NYT Magazine: Niemeyer’s
compositional strategies and his narrow repertoire of forms are not derived
from purported renaissance or baroque inspirations, but from the neoclassical
principles which are those of Le Corbusier.
Main façade of the Itamaraty Palace and its reflecting
pool.
Furthermore,
Niemeyer shared with his master the fundamental belief in the “civilizing
mission” of the state—namely, the state privilege of hoarding unlimited acres
of urban land to carve the city (and society) according to the ideals of the
ruling elite. The two architects, Le Corbusier and Niemeyer, demand the
patronage of tyrants – or, rather, tyrants with a Vision. The New York
Times Magazine does not tell its readers that Niemeyer’s Algerian
projects overlap with the most authoritarian stage of the Boumediene
dictatorship, between 1971 and 1975.
In the Brazilian
press, Niemeyer’s death in 2012 (at the age of 104), was accompanied
predominantly by two types of reviews. One kind stated that his work was genius
because it reflected the “humanist thought” of the unrepentant Stalinist
architect. This is an abominable opinion, but a coherent one. The other kind
stated that his incredible body of work should be separated from his deplorable
political beliefs. This is flimsy and inconsistent criticism. The architecture
of Niemeyer, as of Le Corbusier’s, is not only a derivation of his ideological
leanings but also a platform for his desired alliance between the architects
and the tyrants. Le Corbusier served both Stalin and the collaborationist Vichy
regime. “France needs a father”, pleaded the architect shortly before the
publication of The Radiant City, whose title page says: “This book
is dedicated to the Authority.” Here is the key to deciphering his work, and
Niemeyer’s.
The Piazza della
Signoria, which has no trees, is a wonder of the dessicated human spirit. You
don’t need to be a romantic, nor do you need to shed any tears for the “green”,
to be repulsed by the brutality of Niemeyer’s modernism. One doesn’t need to
subscribe to the whole set of principles of organic architecture to repudiate
the ignominious monumentalism of the Modern Temple. “The plan shall govern. The
street must disappear”, wrote Le Corbusier in 1924, pointing to the direction
adopted by Niemeyer. The destructive impulse is contained in each of the
architectural interventions of both designers, whether the result happens to be
beautiful or, more often, not.
Niemeyer’s
buildings never establish meaningful or functional relationships with the
surrounding structures, which he despises because they didn’t originate from
his pencil. The residual spaces between volumes never acquire identity,
functioning only as belvederes for contemplating his monuments to Authority.
The larger the scale of the project, the more evident his “anachronistic
modernity.” “The guiding role of open spaces, with its streets, squares,
meeting places and markets” is diluted in Brasilia, “in a space without limits
or other function than to frame isolated and sculptural buildings.” (J. C.
Durand & E. Salvatori).
Niemeyer’s
aesthetics make a political statement. In Brasilia, as James Holston has
emphasized, the typological contrast between public buildings (“exceptional,
figural objects of monumental nature”) and residential buildings (“repeated,
serial objects of trivial nature”) epitomize the regressive utopia desired by
the architect. A letter by Alberto Moravia to an Italian newspaper at the time
of Brasilia’s inauguration as the capital noted that the city made people feel “like the tiny inhabitants of Lilliput”
seeking, “in the empty sky, the threatening form of a new Gulliver.”
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