RESOUNDING ARCHITECTURE

There is one noun that recurs in a cyclical, urgent, and at times obsessive manner in the writings of Oscar Niemeyer. Whether autobiographical memories, observations quickly annotated with the help of a drawing, or contributions drafted by others, one almost inevitably discovers a presence that decisively runs through the work—and, more deeply, the thinking—of the Brazilian architect: that noun is curve. 

The noun "curve," from the Latin curvus and from the Middle English "curved," dates to the modern age and identifies a body that is bent: it is an element that lingers in endless acrobatics and contorsions and exhibits itself to be flexed. In a theme that was particularly dear to Niemeyer as well as to most architects, in the very first instance the curve represents a component of the landscape, as well as a tool cherished by illustrious artistic traditions. It is the dizzying line described by the tropical vegetation of São Conrado, the spiral that climbs up along a promontory of Guanabara Bay, the horizon that seems to arch slightly when contemplated from great distances. A figure, in other words, that joins within itself a decalogue of geometries as concrete as they are imaginary, having precise geographical and chronological coordinates.

Oscar Niemeyer was born in Rio de Janeiro in December 1907. On many occasions the spotlight has been on the longevity of the architect, who died at the venerable age of one hundred and five, with respect to the relatively young history of his native country; a country where Niemeyer had a profound and constant voice, one that was often misunderstood and cause for discussion. In the midst of this curvilinear tale, Residência Henrique Xavier in Rio de Janeiro, presumably Niemeyer's first private residence, which he delivered in 1936, can taken one by surprise. Here, a concession is granted to the suppleness of the sole plant element in the courtyard opposite the building. The architecture, instead, betrays an early understanding of the thinking of Le Corbusier, who during those very years Niemeyer was assisting with the design of the Ministério da Educação e Saúde building, also through his Brazilian mentor, Luigi Costa. The small building, which was never actually built, consists of a system of rectilinear volumes that toy with the alternation of fulls and voids, exploiting the suspension made possible by the pilotis, the planar roof, and the configuration of interior spaces that already smacks of the promenade. Hence, the curve, but also its necessary double, the dark side of the moon: the straight line that breaks, suspends, generates a gap.

A similar formal rhythm, in that it is structurally political, whereby the movement of the circle is combined with the straight advancing of the vertical, explains the composition of the monumental Building of the National Congress in Brasília, a city built from scratch starting from Costa's Plano Piloto. In Praça dos Três Poderes, the imposing pair of dome-shaped buildings that, one supine the other prone, host the headquarters of the Senado Federal and of the Câmara dos Deputados, in turn frame an equally imposing pair of towers fourteen stories high. Passersby thus find themselves in an ideal city that has suddenly become synthetic and played out on intersections that, in Niedermeyer's thinking, are identifying, amidst concave, convex, horizontal, vertical, and oblique elements.

According to William J. R. Curtis, this glossary of geometries possesses a nature that it anything but ahistorical or idealizing, as has often been affirmed (and certainly not incorrectly) in recording the "globalizing" ascendant of the Modern Movement. Rather, it is a vocabulary of signs whose configuration cannot operatively be separated from places, latitudes, stories, and traditions steeped in localisms and ancient legacies, of which each geography is a witness. Hence, the question: how to convert calibrated forms on equatorial climates of the Amazon lowlands and of the immense plateaus of Brazil to the equally polyphonic (and different) climes of the Italian peninsula? A possible answer finds the geographical cartographic summary to be a valid stratagem. A compendium made up of symphonies, bodies of water for as far as the eye can see, and alien vessels, to be imagined in the form of a travel diary in four stages. Crossing the decades and the polycentric fabric of the Italian peninsula, let the itinerary begin:

Act I. January 29, 2010, the Oscar Niemeyer Auditorium in Ravello, a splendid town in the Campania region and a world heritage site on the Gulf of Salerno, was inaugurated. At the time of its opening, the result of complex planning that had begun at the start of the new millennium in collaboration with José Carlos Sussekind and a group of Italian architects, Niemeyer was one hundred and three years old. Contemplated from off the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea, the Auditorium appears to be a candid jewel on a large scale, in which broad surfaces seem pierced by round openings, ovaloid windows, and thin slits. The emersion of the curve, celebrated in its endless essences—for a repertoire of sinusoids and arctangents culminating in an impressive thirty-five-meter vaulted roof—is made possible by an extensive planar hallway (a veritable "infinitive terrace") facing the Gulf, and by the insertion of a "protruding floor" located farther to the back that bestows on the volume the appearance of something suspended and lightweight. Like the waves of the sea that make a sound, the concrete of the vault realizes a movement that is equally wavering and radial and aimed at amplifying the sound inside it.  By offloading its weight on a composition of "polycentric arches," the architecture conceived by Niemeyer can be heard.

Act II. Going back about fifty years, in 1975 the Casa Editrice Mondadori opened in Segrate, a populated town northeast of Milan.  If observed—better yet discovered!—while traveling along the Circonvallazione Est, the building designed by Niemeyer floats like a tunnel on a body of artificial water. Once again, the vital energy of the sinusoidal element intercepts the silence of the horizontal levels, the reflection of the crowded highway that unwinds and of the surrounding lands, the memory of a prosperous rural past. A diagram of cement portals adroitly arranged in an irregular manner embraces the main body of the five-floor building, whose stories are in fact suspended with respect to the ground. A dyad of low buildings emerges from the water level, flanking the imposing and embroidered volume. Inside it are offices and publication areas that appear to be guarded over in a disciplined maze of curves and counter-curves. The architecture has a cinematographic aura to it, step after step.

Act III. A further temporal-geographic leap with the opening of Palazzo Fata (Fabbrica Automazione Trasporti e Affini), which took place in 1979 in Pianezza, in the province of Turin. The Fata project shows a deep connection with its publishing "twin" that had been inaugurated just a few years earlier.  What returns, in fact, is the monumental pierced and suspended volume on a triad of concrete pylons. The game of fulls and voids is realized in a container of arches that embraces the complex, overlooking a concrete clearing and a territory that, except for soft heights, extends plateau-like. If observed while arriving from Turin, Fata resembles an evocative "bridge" gravitating to the ground. In the late 1970s, in a moment that was politically difficult for Italian history, Niemeyer aimed to express a complex image between innovation and memory: what come to mind are the imposing arches of the Augustean Porta Palatina, in the heart of Turin. 

Act IV. We have now reached the last stop on the journey, in 1981, with the evocative Cartiere Burgo in San Mauro Torinese, just outside the capital of the Piedmont region. The building, in its last decade devoid of a univocal function, "lands" on the industrial area in the manner of a flying saucer, a body that is at once remote and futuristic and that imposes itself sculpturally on the surrounding area. A system of buttresses and intervals harbors the central section, opportunely featuring glass and the seat of the reception buildings, while hidden at a lower level and therefore one that is invisible to the public eye are the service areas, neatly divided into modular units. The poetry of the dodecahedron and a symphony of circles cadence an equilibrium of forms that, almost lifting up from the mesh of time and history, exist as an idea and as a presence: the architecture resounds. In its deepest essence, it intersects multiple latitudes, discovering in the abstraction the key to a collective dialogue that is anything but acritical and that instead, to use Niemeyer's own words, must be intimately helpful: "I think we must have pleasure in helping one another, that’s what’s important." An inescapable matter, especially for the fate of architecture.