Oscar Niemeyer
The Niterói Contemporary Art Museum (Photo:Wikipedia)
The leftist position of Niemeyer would cost him much during the CIA-backed Cold War military dictatorship. His office was pillaged, the headquarters of the magazine he coordinated was destroyed, his projects mysteriously began to be refused and clients disappeared.
In 1965, two hundred professors asked for his resignation from the University of Brasília, in protest against the government treatment of universities. In the same year he traveled to France for an exhibition in the Louvre museum.
In the following year, his work hindered in Brazil, Niemeyer moved to Paris. There he started a new phase of his life and workmanship. He opened an office on the Champs-Élysées, and had customers in diverse countries, especially in Algeria where, among others he designed the University of Constantine. In Paris he created the headquarters of the French Communist Party (photos), Place du Colonel Fabien, and in Italy that of the Mondadori publishing company. In Funchal on Madeira and old hotel from the 19th century was removed to build a Casino by Niemeyer.Another prominent design of his was the Penang State Mosque in George Town the state capital of Penang, Malaysia in 1970s.
Le Volcan, Le Havre, France (Photo:Wikipedia)
The dictatorship lasted 21 years, until 1985. Under João Figueiredo's rule it softened and gradually turned into a democracy. At this time Niemeyer decided to return to his country. He himself defines this time as the beginning of the last phase of his life. During that decade he made the Memorial Juscelino Kubitschek (1980), the Pantheon (1985) and the Latin America Memorial (1987), the last a beautiful sculpture representing the wounded hand of Jesus, whose wound bleeds in the shape of Central and South America.
In 1988 Oscar Niemeyer was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize, together with the American architect Gordon Bunshaft.
He designed at least two more buildings in Brasilia, small ones that are arguably among his greatest, the Memorial dos Povos Indigenas ("Memorial for the Indigenous People") and the Catedral Militar, Igreja de N.S. da Paz.
In 1996, at 89 years old, he created what many consider his greatest work: the Niterói Contemporary Art Museum (in the city of Niterói, a city next to Rio de Janeiro). The building flies from a rock, giving a beautiful view of the Guanabara Bay and the city of Rio de Janeiro. Critics of the museum say the building is so exotic that it upstages the works of art inside it.
In 2003, Niemeyer was called to design the Serpentine Gallery Summer Pavilion in Hyde Park London, a gallery that each year invites a famous architect who has never previously built in the UK, to design this temporary structure.
On December 10, 2004, a tombstone of Communist Carlos Marighella, in Salvador, Bahia was inaugurated to celebrate the 35th anniversary of his death. The tombstone was designed by Niemeyer.
In 2005, one of his project entitled "ESTAÇÃO CIÊNCIA, CULTURA e ARTES " was approved to be built at Joao Pessoa, the easternmost point of the Americas, at 34º 47' 38" west longitude and 7º 9' 28" south latitude (in Portuguese).
Today, Niemeyer is over 99 and still involved in diverse projects, mainly sculptures and readjustments of old works of his that, protected by national (and some cases international) historic heritage regulations, can only be modified by him. He is currently designing a statue showing a tiger with its mouth open and a man fighting it raising the Cuban flag against the US blockade of Cuba.
In 2006, Niemeyer(98) wed longtime aide Vera Lucia Cabreira(60) at his apartment in Rio de Janeiro's Ipanema district a month after fracturing his hip in a fall.
