Oscar Niemeyer

摘要

When Oscar Niemeyer was a tiny child, he would draw in the air with his fingers. As soon as he could hold a pencil his mother gave him one, and he drew the same thing: floating, weightless shapes, forming and reforming. When, as a teenager, he discovered the brothels of Rio, his lines began to follow the curves of women, hip, breast and thigh. Influencing him too, through every pore, were the elliptical white beaches of Brazil, its sinuous rivers, the rounded towers of its baroque churches, its heaped-up mountains and the curling waves of the ocean. Le Corbu-sier, the Swiss-born architect whose modernist ideas he absorbed and then subverted, told him he had Brazil's mountains in his eyes. Not quite true, said Mr Niemeyer; he had everything he loved in them.