Brazil on Thursday mourned its star architect Oscar Niemeyer, as tributes poured in from around the world eulogizing him as a towering figure of modern architecture.
“I join the whole of Brazil in mourning him,” former Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva wrote on Thursday, a day after Niemeyer passed away in Rio at the age of 104.
“He left us, but will always be among us, present in the lines of buildings he designed in Brazil and around the world,” he said.
Photo: Reuters
Niemeyer was embalmed in Rio early on Thursday before being flown to Brasilia.
A solemn memorial ceremony was held in the Planalto presidential palace in Brasilia, the futuristic capital he helped create.
Afterwards, his casket, draped in the green and yellow Brazilian flag, was loaded onto a firetruck ahead of a flight back to Niemeyer’s native Rio for a private wake by family and friends.
Yesterday, the body was to lie in state before the burial at the Sao Joao Batista cemetery in Rio’s Botafogo District.
Soon after Niemeyer’s death was announced, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff hailed him as “one of Brazil’s geniuses” and a “revolutionary who “always dreamt of a more egalitarian society.”
Tributes poured in from abroad as well, with fellow winners of the Pritzker prize, likened to architecture’s Nobel, remembering Niemeyer as a colossus in his field and his flare for wavy, curvaceous structures as a source of inspiration and creativity.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon hailed him as “a towering figure,” saying that he was one of the original architects of the UN headquarters in New York.
Winner of the Pritzker Prize in 1988, Niemeyer started his career in the 1930s and went on working well into the 21st century, after turning 100.
Niemeyer works can be found in countries as far-flung as Algeria, Italy, Israel, the US and Cuba, whose longtime revolutionary icon Fidel Castro was one of his personal friends.
The Cuban Communist Party newspaper Granma called Niemeyer an unwavering friend of the Cuban revolution and of Castro.
It quoted Niemeyer as saying: “I will never shut my mouth. I will never hide my communist convictions.”
In 1956, Niemeyer was appointed chief architect on a project to provide Brazil with a modern new capital city in the heart of the jungle.
One of his most spectacular works was a contemporary art museum created in 1996 — when Niemeyer was already 89 years old. Located in Niteroi, a town near Rio, it includes an structure shaped like an upturned dish, poised over the ocean on rocky cliffs.
Born in Rio into a family of German, Portuguese and Arab ancestry, Niemeyer created about 400 buildings in all, including the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park, London and the Penang State Mosque in Malaysia.
In 1928, he married Annita Baldo. The marriage lasted 76 years until Annita’s death in 2004. Their only daughter, Anna Maria, died of emphysema in 2009 at the age of 82.
At the age of 98, the star architect got married again, this time to his loyal assistant Vera Lucia Cabreira, 38 years younger than him.
“I accompanied him to the hospital a month ago. I saw him get better and get worse. He was lucid, told me he wanted to eat cake and have coffee,” TV network Globo’s news portal quoted her as saying.
The jury that awarded Niemeyer the Pritzker prize wrote: “He captured the essence of Brazil with his architecture. His buildings distilled the colors, light and sensual image of his native country.”
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