Browsing: Oscar Niemeyer

Ravello, off South Italy’s coast, is said to be one of the most beautiful spots on earth. And Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer’s all-white curvaceous auditorium is set amongst its luxuriant rocky hillsides and against the backdrop of the refined Amalfi coastal town’s trademark awe-inspiring brilliant blue sea and endless open skies.

Completion is due in September, ready to showcase the new auditorium’s unique feature: its over-hanging canopied roof (or solaio a sbalzo in Italian). More plainly put, this means that while the amenities are set off the entrance piazza or in the floors below, a section of the 1,500m2 canopy, which contains the actual auditorium space, literally and strikingly, hangs in the air supported by nothing.

Seen at Wallpaper. More images after the break (we searched all over the web for more images, if you can find some, please post the links!) read more »

Vice Magazine went to Brazil to interview the legendary architecture master Oscar Niemeyer. A pioneer in reinforced concrete, played a crucial role in the modern movement, not only because of formal or material explorations, but also for designing the new capital for Brazil: Brasilia. The whole city was built in only 4 years, and was a sandbox to put in practice the ideals of the modern movement.

Oscar Niemeyer is now 101 years old, and he keeps working every day at his office in Rio de Janeiro, with on going projects in Brazil and Spain. I think that his secret is how passionate he is about architecture and women, and he has devoted his life to both.

mountains/waves/women = curves

It is not the right angle that attracts me. nor the straight line, tough, inflexible, created by man. what attracts me is the free, sensual curve. the curve I find in the mountains of my country, in the sinuous course of its rivers, in the waves of the sea, in the clouds of the sky, in the body of the favourite woman. Of curves is made all the universe.

You can read a short version of the intervier at Vice Magazine.