“It isn’t the right angle which attracts me, it isn’t the straight line, hard, inflexible, man made. What interests me is the free and sensual curve. The curve that I find in the mountains of my country, along the sinuous course of its rivers, in the waves of the sea and in the clouds in the sky, in the body of a woman. The universe is made from curves”.
The thoughts and words of the ninety five year old Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, the last living master of modernism to which the museum of architecture in Frankfurt is dedicating a retrospective.
The exhibition illustrates a career which covers 500 buildings, in Brazil, France, Algeria, US, Italy and Germany. It also includes his most well known work, the design for the city of Brasilia, carried out together with Lucio Costa and begun in 1956.
The travelling exhibition, curated by Cecília Scharlach and Haron Cohen, has already been shown in São Paolo, Rio de Janeiro, Lisbon, Paris and Brussels.
1.3.2003 – 11.5.2003 Oscar Niemeyer. A Legend of Modernism Deutsches Architektur Museum Schaumainkai 43, Frankfurt am Main T +49-69-21231665 http://dam.inm.de
National Congress, Brasília, Brasil, around 1965. Photo Marcel Gautherot / Instituto Moreira Salles
Alvorada Palace (Residence of the President), Brasília, Brasil. Photo Michel Moch