Oscar Niemeyer — Profile, Rankings & Fame Trend

Summary

Updated 2026-06-21

He built a capital from scratch in the Brazilian interior — an entire modernist city dropped onto the savanna. The curves of Brasília's National Congress, its hyperboloid cathedral, the paired towers floating over reflecting pools: all Niemeyer, all completed by 1960, and all still the closest the 20th century came to a unified architectural vision at the sc

Biography

About

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;…

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Oscar Niemeyer

Oscar Niemeyer

said13 Apr 2007

I had some good opportunities. I was lucky to have had the chance to do things differently. Architecture is about surprise.

— Quoted in "Architect of Optimism," Angel Gurria-Quintana, Financial Times (13 April 2007)

Oscar Niemeyer

said13 Apr 2007

My ambition has always been to reduce a building’s support to a minimum. The more we diminish supporting structures, the more audacious and important the architecture is.

— Quoted in "Architect of Optimism," Angel Gurria-Quintana, Financial Times (13 April 2007)

Oscar Niemeyer

said2004

It is not the right angle that attracts me, nor the straight line, hard and inflexible, created by man.

— As quoted in Plans, Sections and Elevations : Key Buildings of the Twentieth Century (2004) by Richard Weston

Oscar Niemeyer

said2000

I was attracted by the curve — the liberated, sensual curve suggested by the possibilities of new technology yet so often recalled in venerable old baroque churches.

— The Curves of Time: The Memoirs of Oscar Niemeyer (2000), p. 169

Oscar Niemeyer

said2000