(5 Dec 2012)
Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer dies in hospital, aged 104
Story No.: 869855
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Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - 4 November 2010
1. Various of Brazil's soccer legend Pele, left, and Oscar Niemeyer, renowned Brazilian architect at a news conference
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - 8 February 2012
2. Wide of Sambodrome designed by Niemeyer for Rio's famous carnival celebrations
3. Various of Rio de Janeiro Mayor Eduardo Paes and Niemeyer at Sambodrome
Brasilia, Brazil - 30 July 2012
4. Wide of the city of Brasilia designed by Niemeyer
STORYLINE:
On December 5th 2012 renowned Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, whose trademark sensuous curves in reinforced concrete are synonymous with Brazilian architecture, died.
He was 104 years old.
Niemeyer was best known for designing Brazil's capital, Brasilia, on the country's empty central plains as a symbol of the nation's future.
Niemeyer was taken to hospital in Rio de Janeiro on November 2nd after a cold that he caught several weeks before led to dehydration, which compromised his kidneys.
A bout of bleeding in his digestive tract in November complicated his health.
In a statement released earlier on December 5th, Rio de Janeiro's Samaritano Hospital said Niemeyer was in a grave state and getting worse.
The hospital said a respiratory infection meant the architect continued to require a ventilator and was also sedated. Niemeyer was also suffering from kidney failure.
A spokeswoman for the Hospital Samaritano confirmed Niemeyer's passing but did not give a cause of death.
Niemeyer designed much of Brazil's futuristic capital of Brasilia as well as Rio's Sambadrome, where the city's annual carnival parade is held.
In works from Brasilia's crown-shaped cathedral to the undulating French Communist Party building in Paris, Niemeyer shunned the steel-box structures of many modernist architects, finding inspiration in nature's crescents and spirals.
His hallmarks include much of the United Nations complex in New York and the Museum of Modern Art in Niteroi, which is perched like a flying saucer across Guanabara Bay from Rio de Janeiro.
"Right angles don't attract me. Nor straight, hard and inflexible lines created by man," he wrote in his 1998 memoir 'The Curves of Time'.
"What attracts me are free and sensual curves. The curves we find in mountains, in the waves of the sea, in the body of the woman we love."
Speaking to the Associated Press in 2007, Niemeyer said "the important thing is for the architect to do what he likes to do, and not what others would like him to do. I follow this path".
His curves give sweep and grace to Brasilia, the city that opened up Brazil's vast interior in the 1960s and moved the nation's capital from coastal Rio.
Niemeyer designed most of the city's important buildings, while French-born, avant-garde architect Lucio Costa crafted its distinctive airplane-like layout.
Niemeyer left his mark in the flowing concrete of the Cabinet ministries and the monumental dome of the national museum.
Living well past the century mark, Niemeyer's journey mirrored that of his beloved Brazil, and his restless modernism captured the developing country's sweeping ambitions.
With hundreds of his buildings dotting the landscape, arguably no other architect shared as tight a bond with a country as Niemeyer did with Brazil.
Oscar Niemeyer Soares Filho was born on December 15, 1907, in Rio de Janeiro, and earned his architecture degree at Rio's School of Fine Arts.
Niemeyer teamed up again with Le Corbusier in 1947 to design much of the United Nations complex in New York.
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