Oscar Niemeyer

Niemeyer graduated from the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio and interned with Lúcio Costa in the 1930s, working on the Palácio Gustavo Capanema. His breakthrough came with the Pampulha buildings north of Belo Horizonte - especially the Church of Saint Francis of Assisi, which brought international notice. Through the 1940s and 1950s he designed prolifically, collaborated with Le Corbusier on the United Nations Headquarters in New York, and taught at Yale and Harvard. In 1956 the president, his old Pampulha client Juscelino Kubitschek, tapped him to design Brasília's core civic buildings; the experimental concrete forms he delivered made him globally synonymous with Brazilian modernism. A member of the Communist Party, he left Brazil after the 1964 coup, spent two decades in Paris, returned in 1985, and won the Pritzker Prize in 1988. He kept drawing past 100, completing around 600 projects over 78 years, and died in Rio five days before his 105th birthday.