OSCAR NIEMEYER - THE 100-YEAR-OLD KING OF BRAZILIAN INSANOTECTURE

By VBS Staff

Brasilia provided Niemeyer the perfect template to test out all the theoretical business he and his modernist colleagues had been cooking up for the past two decades. Together with urban planner Luis Costa, he designed a functionally integrated city full of massive concrete mushroom buildings and swooping aluminum spires and twisty overpasses and skyways and symbolic edifices and designated “sectors” where no one would ever have to watch out for traffic or wait at a stoplight. It’s basically the bastard child of Alphaville and Albany, NY, and to this day remains a benchmark in what we really hope the future is going to look like.

It also sealed his reputation as one of the century’s most influential architects and certainly its most influential Brazilian. Then an anti-communist military junta seized control of the country and kicked him out. Anyways, this week Motherboard invades the workspace of this centegenarian brainosaur, clad in our finest pair of swim trunks. To learn the harrowing tale of robbery, human feces, and woe which led to this disastrous state of affairs click here. Or, if you want to see some pictures of the city that love (and the tenets of the 1933 Athens Charter of Urban Planning) built, check out Niemeyer’s flickr pool. Sorry, not his personal photos, just a bunch of pictures of his stuff. Like these: