One may say that Oscar Niemeyer had a perspective on life completely different to that of many of those working elsewhere in modern architecture. He began life as a modernist, but gradually forged an architectural style that was both unique and ahead of its time, a symbol of the colour and lust for life of his native Brazil. He once told a newspaper: ‘Mine is an architecture of curves; the body of a woman, the sinuous rivers, the waves of the sea’.
Through his professional life, Niemeyer retained defining traits of the Modernists. However, the Brazilian simply didn’t have the mass production mindset natural to the European modernists, obsessed with finding ways of building cheap housing for the multitudes. Niemeyer would ask ‘How can you repeat a house that has specific level curves, a certain light or a landscape? How can you build it over again?’ He explained later: ‘It was not the imposition of the right angle which made me mad, but the obsessive concern of an architectonical purity, of structural logic, of the systematic campaign against the free and creative shape.’
Gaynor Aaltonen. The history of architecture: iconic buildings throughout the ages. London: Arcturus, 2008, p. 615-621 (adapted).
Based on the text, judge the items from 22 through 28.
While the image of Brazil is created by the use of expressions such as “colour and lust for life”, “curves” and references to nature, Europe is linked to “mass-production”, “right angle”, “architectonical purity” and “structural logic”.
