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Channelbeta - Information
Channel on Contemporary Architecture |
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[2008-02-19] |
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channelbeta COPYFREE |
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Whether
he likes or not, Niemeyer has become part of the general imaginary of the
Brazilian. Television took possession of his own creations: The Brazilian
natonal telephone company,TIM Brazil, has recently filmed a spot in Ibirapuera
Auditorium (and everyone knows how invasive and pushing this company can be);
in San Paolo the ministry of health choose the Copan
building as background for the "doe
vida" organ donation campaign letting a red heart shaped ballon soaring in
front of it. And Brasilia? Brasilia has been damned to
be the imagine of itself since when it was just a mere idea in the president Kubitschek's
mind. In fact in 1964 this city, still a building yard, could be seen in the cinemas
all over the world in the movie "L'homme
de Rio". Today Brasilia daily appears in the background
of all political news: the number of times the Congress Palace appears in the
news could be compared to the number of times the White House appears on the It
TV. On the home page of the capital city you find a close
up of the cathedral. The very shield of the federal district reproduces a "column"
of the Alvorada palace. Brazilian television stations like TV Camera and TV Senado
choose stylized drawings of Niemeyer's works as their logos. It is almost
annoying. News-shop
keepers , taxi-drivers, waiters, beggars, pedlars, in Rio everybody knows Niemeyer. They
call him with respect Doctor Oscar. The Brazilian are proud of Niemeyer's
architecture and Niemeyer is proud to be Brazilian. It was not by chance that last December Marcus Lontra named one of his most successful exhibitions: "Oscar Niemeyer - Arquiteto brasileiro cidadão". The MAC of Niteroi is after all the best place to tell us his long story. A time travel in the end. Kadu Niemeyer's pictures, drawings, sketches, lots of sketches, the latest projects: the Sambodromo of Brasilia, the Cultural Centre of Prince of Austria, the Museum of Modern Art in Baixada (Maumba) in Spain. And then Bruno Giorgi's, Alfredo Ceschiatti's, Portinari's and Franz Weissman's works . All artists who worked with him.
O
Dia celebrates his hundredth birthday with a dossier
called " Oscar Niemeyer - o mago das curvas". O
Globo publishes on the 12 th of December a dossier called
"Niemeyer 100", and for a week it publicizes
it with the words Oscar
Niemeyer. O homem. O
mito. O
caderno especial. The
IPHAN (National Institute of Historical and Artistic Heritage) has elected 24
Niemeyer's projects, 23 of them are in Brasilia, while among his works in
Rio de Janeiro the Canoas
House has been chosen and
has become the seat of Oscar Niemeyer's foundation. The
moving installation of the artistic collective Biruta,
for one week, has projected 32 pictures of the architect's works on the walls
and facades of several buildings in Rio and Niteroi. In
France he was named Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur and by this occasion
he said: "to be one hundred years old doesn't mean anything, with 70 you start
to say goodbye to friends, women, and to everything worth. What does matter is
life in the whole, every single minute. When
I look back I can say that I didn't make any concessions and that I
stayed on the right way. That gives me peace." In
a posthumous interview to the movie "Andrej Rublev" Andrej Tarkovskij
speaks about man's experiences and says: "everybody must make his own experience,
but when we finally achieve it, it is time to die, we don't get the
chance to use it. In the meanwhile the young generations grow up and refuse to
listen to the old, rightly so, they look for their own experience, and when they
achieve it their lives too are at the end." This
doesn't seem to be true for Oscar Niemeyer. He
had time, used it and keeps on using it. In
a recent conference organized by the newspaper O Globo one week before the fifteen
December 2007 José Carlos Sussekind (Niemeyer's structuring engineer) says: "If
he thought to have already seen everything, his life would be over. He always
pursues everything and he have always been a very curious man". Niemeyer
is not the stereotypical old man, he fears the past more than the future. "In
the past," he says, " I see a lot of sadness. In the future, where people see
their own death, I see a continuous
work, the magic of creation and a never ending fight." Niemeyer's
literary masterpiece, As curvas do tempo,
presents 292 notes in just 33 pages. Most of them are about people he cared about,
mostly colleagues, friends, artists and companions. 163 of them are dead, some
died around the world, some disappeared during the regime, most passed of old
age. The wife Annita, Lucio Costa, Candido Portinari, Afonso Reidy, Fernando Saturnino
Britto, Roberto Burle Marx, Juscelino Kubitschek. Wonderful people with whom he
shared ideas and very strong passions, moments of joy and sadness. People he saw,
one by one, disappear for ever. How
did you survive to everything? "I
watched out of my studio's window and think about something else, then I see
the waves crashing and braking on the strand, the desert strand and an overwhelming
sadness seams to crawl over the world."
Translated by Pietro De Berardinis |
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Pictures prov ided by
tha author |
