Modernist architecture emerged in the early 20th century as a reaction against the ornamental styles of the Victorian era and Art Nouveau. Rejecting decoration, modernism prioritised function, embracing new technologies and materials that arose from the Industrial Revolution. It also responded to the growing need for housing as a result of urbanisation. This was architecture for a new century, employing new construction methods and a fresh aesthetic that addressed social, technological and cultural shifts.

A whistle-stop introduction to modernist architecture

Throughout the 20th century, modernism spawned distinct regional variants. Le Corbusier's five points of architecture (more on this below) came to define the International Style, which is probably what most people think of when they think of modernism, characterised by clean lines, a ‘truth to materials’, and hallmarks such as flat roofs, glass curtain walls and steel frames.

In Europe, the Bauhaus School emerged as a prominent source of modernist thinking, with offshoots including brutalist architecture. The United States became a major centre for modernism, developing variants such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie School, California modernism and midcentury modernism. In Brazil and other equatorial regions, tropical modernism adapted the movement’s principles to local climates, while, in India, the quest for a postcolonial identity gave rise to its own iteration.

In the post-war period, modernist styles became the dominant aesthetic for institutional and civic buildings – known as late modernism (1950s-1970s). With the rise of minimalist modernism, which provided the blueprint for skyscrapers, and brutalism, which was often used in urban planning, the style faced mounting criticism for being sterile and monotonous. The architectural pendulum, as ever, began to swing back, sparking a renewed interest in complexity that heralded the rise of postmodernism.

Famous modernist architects

To tackle the long list of famous modernist architects, we have organised them by their continent of origin. This list is by no means exhaustive – modernism's vast and diverse nature means there will be many more – yet this is a strong starting point for the movement's most influential proponents.

Further, it reflects the societal imbalances of the 20th century – for instance, in terms of gender. Architecture has historically been a male-dominated profession, with women often pigeonholed into interiors or furniture design rather than building design. Recognition and attribution biases further obscured their contributions, frequently reducing their roles to collaboration or assistance.

Eurocentric aesthetic standards have also shaped the history of modernism, with Western movements often elevated as universal benchmarks, which is why we have chosen to represent a geographically diverse selection. That said, we have started with Europe, where modernism originated.

Europe

Le Corbusier (1887-1965)

Style: International style
Famous works: Villa Savoye; Unité d'Habitation; Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut, all France; the city of Chandigarh, India

Swiss-French architect and urban planner Le Corbusier viewed architecture as ‘a machine for living’, and was one of modernism’s most influential figures. He developed the ‘Five Points of Architecture’ – a set of principles advocating the use of pilotis (stilts), open floor plans, free façades, horizontal windows and rooftop gardens – which essentially constitutes the familiar modernist aesthetic. Le Corbusier is also known for the pivotal role he played in designing the Indian city of Chandigarh.

Walter Gropius (1883-1969)

Style: Bauhaus
Famous works: Bauhaus Dessau, Germany; Gropius House, USA

Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus School in Germany in 1919 (later forced to close by the Nazis in 1933). The movement embraced key modernist ideas such as form following function and simplicity in design, while also introducing distinctive concepts like the fusion of art and industry and the use of materials such as steel and glass. The Bauhaus building in Dessau, the art school’s HQ, is an iconic example of this architecture.

Alvar Aalto (1898-1976)

Style: Humanist modernism, organic architecture
Famous works: Paimio Sanatorium; Finlandia Hall, both Finland; Viipuri Library, Russia

Alvar Aalto was a Finnish architect and furniture designer who embraced functional modernist principles while humanising them through the use of natural materials – especially wood – and organic forms. His career coincided with Finland’s rapid industrialisation in the early 20th century, helping establish the style that he developed with his wife, Aino Aalto, as a blueprint for the Scandinavian modern aesthetic.

Eileen Gray (1878-1976)

Style: International style
Famous works: Villa E-1027; Tempe à Pailla, both France

Irish designer and architect Eileen Gray struggled to establish herself in a male-dominated field, but is now celebrated as one of the most important figures in 20th-century design. Her style blended art deco elegance with modernist functionality, exemplified in the E-1027 house in France, a minimalist villa featuring built-in furniture and sliding panels, which was incorrectly attributed to Le Corbusier for many years.

Lisbeth Sachs (1914-2002)

Style: Organic architecture, humanist modernism
Famous works: Summer House Strauss, Switzerland

The work of Lisbeth Sachs, one of the first registered female architects in Switzerland, is marked by an organic sensibility, with curvilinear forms, expressive materials and structural clarity. She created spaces where interior and exterior boundaries blur, exemplified in her 1976 project, the Summer House Strauss. Her long-overdue recognition culminated with a dedicated showcase at the Swiss Pavilion during this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale (2025).

Africa

Hassan Fathy (1900-1989)

Style: Vernacular modernism
Famous works: New Gourna Village, Egypt

Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy blended modernist principles with traditional building techniques, using indigenous materials such as mud brick and vernacular methods like Nubian vaults and passive cooling to achieve climate-responsive design. Culturally, Fathy sought to develop community-centered, affordable housing for rural, economically disadvantaged Egyptians. This philosophy is exemplified in New Gourna, a planned resettlement village near Luxor, designed in the 1940s.

Demas Nwoko (b. 1935)

Style: African modernism
Famous works: Dominican Institute, Nigeria

Demas Nwoko, a Nigerian architect, artist and designer, integrated indigenous African motifs, materials and crafts into modern architectural practices, challenging Western conventions. He viewed design as a force to positively shape the environment, seeking to create meaningful cultural and social spaces for African communities, such as the educational Dominican Institute, built in the 1970s.

Asia

Charles Correa (1930-2015)

Style: Contextual modernism
Famous works: Gandhi Memorial Museum; Kanchanjunga Apartments; Jawahar Kala Kendra, all India

Although he was born in Mozambique, Charles Correa is primarily associated with Indian architecture, with much of his work addressing urban planning challenges in the country and helping redefine national architecture in the post-independence era. His style fused traditional elements with modernist principles while adapting to local climate and culture. The Gandhi Memorial Museum in Ahmedabad showcases Correa’s signature use of open spaces, natural light and ventilation.

Balkrishna Doshi (1927-2023)

Style: Humanist modernism, brutalism
Famous works: Indian Institute of Management; Aranya low-cost housing, both India

Balkrishna Doshi was profoundly influenced by mentors Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn, but forged his own Indian interpretation of modernism. His work often featured elements suited to India’s climate, such as open courtyards, shaded terraces and natural ventilation. Awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2018, Doshi was celebrated for his humanistic approach, which focuses on low-cost housing, communal spaces and sustainable urban design.

Geoffrey Bawa (1919-2003)

Style: Tropical modernism
Famous works: Kandalama Hotel; Lunuganga Estate; Sri Lankan parliament building, all Sri Lanka

Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa is widely regarded as the father of tropical modernism – an architectural style that merges modernist principles with the demands of tropical climates. His designs frequently blur the lines between indoor spaces and lush natural surroundings, featuring open plans and natural materials. Bawa’s work is climate-responsive, with examples including the Kandalama and Lunuganga hotels, where you can stay today.

Tadao Ando (b. 1941)

Style: Minimalist modernism
Famous works: Church of the Light; Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum; Chichu Art Museum; the Koshino House; the Water Temple, all Japan

Tadao Ando buildings are generally minimalist sanctuaries crafted from exposed concrete with plenty of natural light and water features. His work reflects the Japanese Zen philosophy, with a focus on calm, contemplation and harmony with nature. Iconic projects like the Church of Light in Osaka and the Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum redefined contemporary Japanese architecture.

Minnette de Silva (1918-1998)

Style: Tropical modernism
Famous works: Karunaratne House; Pieris House; Watapuluwa Housing Scheme, all Sri Lanka

Minette de Silva was the first Asian woman elected as an associate of RIBA. She blended modernist principles with crafts, materials and forms suited to the tropical climate of her native Sri Lanka, using, for example, methods such as rammed earth and wattle-and-daub and features like open courtyards, passive ventilation and adjustable partitions. De Silva’s work was largely overlooked due to the gender biases of the 20th-century architectural establishment, but her influence on figures like Geoffrey Bawa is being increasingly recognised.

North America

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959)

Style: Organic architecture, Prairie style
Famous works: Fallingwater, Pennsylvania; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Robie House, Chicago

Frank Lloyd Wright revolutionised American architecture over his 70-year career with his philosophy of organic architecture – buildings that harmonise with their natural surroundings. His Prairie style, prominent between 1900 and 1917, sought to create a distinctly American aesthetic inspired by the landscapes of the Midwest, featuring cantilevered roofs, open floor plans and horizontal lines. Beyond his Prairie homes, Wright’s celebrated works include Fallingwater, a masterclass in environmental integration.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969)

Style: International Style, minimalist modernism
Famous works: Seagram Building (with Philip Johnson), New York; Crown Hall, Chicago

Though he was born in Germany, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe made his mark in the US after emigrating there, helping to define the glass-and-steel aesthetic that laid the foundation for the modern skyscraper. The Seagram Building became, in many ways, the global blueprint for corporate architecture. Credited with popularising the phrase ‘less is more’, van der Rohe’s designs are characterised by clean lines, open floor plans and light-filled, transparent spaces. Read more about Mies van der Rohe's life and works.

Richard Neutra (1892-1970)

Style: Mid-century modernism, California modernism
Famous works: Kaufmann Desert House; Lovell Health House, both California

Austrian-American architect Richard Neutra was a key figure in midcentury modernism, particularly in Southern California, where buildings such as the Kaufmann Desert House in Palm Springs helped define the California modern style. His designs are sleek, light-filled and open plan, emphasising health, lifestyle and a connection with the outdoors through the use of glass and natural materials.

Louis Kahn (1901-1974)

Style: Monumental modernism
Famous works: Salk Institute, California; Kimbell Art Museum, Texas

Louis Kahn, recipient of both the AIA Gold Medal and the RIBA Gold Medal, was renowned for his monumental, monolithic buildings that showcase their weight, materials and structure rather than concealing them. Kahn’s designs blend modernism with classical influences, characterised by geometric forms and materials like brick and concrete.

Charles and Ray Eames (1907-1978 and 1912-1988)

Style: Mid-century modernism
Famous works: Eames House, California

Perhaps two of the most influential figures in 20th-century design, married couple Charles and Ray Eames are renowned for their contributions to architecture, furniture and industrial design. Their use of new materials like moulded plywood and fibreglass combined functionality with aesthetics. The Eames House, built in 1949 in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, stands as a landmark of midcentury modern residential architecture.

South America

Oscar Niemeyer (1907-2012)

Style: Brazilian modernism, sculptural modernism
Famous works: Civic buildings of Brasília; Niterói Museum of Contemporary Art, both Brazil; United Nations Headquarters, US

Strongly influenced by Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer’s use of free-form concrete, often cast in sinuous curves that echoed the natural landscapes of Brazil, led some to dub him a ‘sculptor of monuments’. Along with urban planners Lúcio Costa and Joaquim Cardozo, Niemeyer helped design the new capital of Brasília in the 1950s, including the National Congress, the cathedral and the Palácio da Alborada.

Lina Bo Bardi (1914-1992)

Style: Brazilian modernism, humanist modernism, brutalism
Famous works: SESC Pompéia; Glass House; São Paulo Museum of Art, all Brazil

Born in Italy, Lina Bo Bardi is celebrated for her contributions to Latin American architecture, particularly in Brazil, where she navigated challenges as both a foreigner and a woman. An advocate for architecture’s social potential, she created buildings marked by cultural and material sensitivity, blending brutalist forms with Brazilian vernacular influences.

Carlos Raúl Villanueva (1900-1975)

Style: Regional modernism, brutalism
Famous works: Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas; Olympic Stadium, both Venezuela; Aula Magna, Mexico

Venezuelan but raised in Europe, Carlos Raúl Villanueva brought modernist ideals to Latin America, where he fused them with local cultural and climatic contexts. A defining concept in his work was the idea of ‘synthesis of the arts’, a belief that architecture should be integrated with painting, sculpture and other visual arts. Villanueva also drew from brutalism, with extensive use of reinforced concrete, and his projects often had a social dimension – he played a major role in shaping the urban fabric of cities like Caracas and Maracay.

Le Corbusier first went to Rio de Janeiro in 1929, finding the city ‘violent and sublime’. The Swiss-French architect maintained a connection with Brazil for the rest of his life. He travelled there by Zeppelin, drew up disruptive urban plans for Rio and São Paulo (neither realised), worked with modernists Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa, and designed the Maison du Brésil in Paris (making so many changes to Costa's original plans that the Brazilian removed himself from the project). His final commission was to design the French embassy for the new capital of Brasilia, though it was cut short by his death in 1965.

And yet the connection continues. As part of ‘France-Brazil Season 2025’, a year of cultural exchange, the Maison La Roche, which houses the Fondation Le Corbusier, is hosting the first international show by Brazilian exhibition platform Aberto.

Aberto was founded in 2022 by art consultant Filipe Assis, after he learned that the only Niemeyer-designed house in São Paulo had been put up for sale by the family who commissioned it in 1974. Like many modernist houses in Brazil, it was not landmarked or protected, and could easily be torn down. ‘I wanted to try to give a new purpose to these modern houses,’ Assis recalls. ‘I saw that there was a potential to do an art event, to bring awareness.’

He worked with curators Kiki Mazzucchelli and Claudia Moreira Salles (also a designer) to create the first Aberto exhibition at the house, showing national and international artworks in dialogue with Niemeyer's work. It worked: the family has since kept the house as an event space.

The team put together two subsequent editions of Aberto in other hidden architectural gems around São Paulo (including a little-known 1970s brutalist house by Chu Ming Silveira). After attracting more than 20,000 visitors last year, they decided to take the concept to Europe. Assis says, ‘Paris was the main choice because of Le Corbusier's rich relationship with Brazil.’

Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret designed the Maison La Roche in the 1920s for Swiss banker and art collector Raoul La Roche. With its open concept, ribbon windows and a colour palette of 17 gradient shades, it's a striking setting for Aberto4, which brings together contemporary and 20th-century Brazilian artists.

Some of them are big names, such as Beatriz Milhazes, who currently has a solo show at the Guggenheim in New York. Her vibrantly colourful collage at Maison La Roche includes Chanel ribbons and chocolate wrappers, and shares a hallway with a Le Corbusier collage from 1958.

Another important contemporary figure, Luiz Zerbini, welcomes visitors into the entrance hall with a painting of a decrepit modernist building in the Brazilian city of Recife, its coloured façade reminiscent of Le Corbusier's Cité Radieuse. Zerbini's painting is one of several works created for this show. Many are for sale, which helps to finance the project.

Raoul La Roche's private gallery is the largest room in the house, with a dramatic interior ramp and wall-length, sheet-metal lighting that also serves as a sun shield. It displays a selection of artists from Brazil's concretist and neo-concretist movements, which began in the late 1940s. On a table sits one of Lygia Clark's ‘Bichos’, or ‘Critters’, a hinged metal sculpture. Guest curator Lauro Cavalcanti says that, in the same way Le Corbusier believed sculpture should be ‘listened to’, Clark created these works to be unstable, and ‘activated’ by the viewer (though touching is discouraged).

Up the ramp, in the library, hangs an abstract work by Luísa Matsushita, who spent years singing under the name Lovefoxxx with a Brazilian indie band, and now paints full-time. Her painting for Aberto4 has sensuous organic forms and colour blocks in the shades of Maison La Roche. ‘She wanted to do something fluid, in contrast with the rigid architecture of the house,’ says Mazzucchelli.

A nearby wall shows a textured canvas in rich reds and browns by António Tarsis, who grew up poor in a favela in Salvador. Since his teenage years, he's been collecting discarded objects, which he cuts and dyes, then pastes to form grids with colour variations. ‘His work talks about found materials, recycling, his personal story,’ explains Mazzucchelli. ‘It's incredible what you can make with matchboxes.’

Also hanging in the library is a work by Sidival Fila, who creates art with a different kind of found object: antique textiles. Fila is a Franciscan friar from Brazil who lives in Rome. In his spare time, he meticulously sews old fabric, much of it liturgical, to create structural volumes on canvas frames. Until recently under the radar, he is now represented by Paris gallerist Kamel Mennour, and he donates 100 per cent of his proceeds to charity.

In the dining room, sunlight caresses the sinuous lines of Maria Martins' bronze sculpture, inspired by tree roots in the Amazon and lent to the show by a museum in Brazil. Martins was an important early 20th-century artist who lived in Paris for a time as the wife of a Brazilian diplomat. She was also Marcel Duchamps' lover. ‘He was crazy about her,’ Mazzucchelli says.

On the floor above, works by two major Brazilian names, Anna Maria Maiolino (soon to have a show at the Musée Picasso) and Tunga, grace La Roche's surprisingly modest bedroom. Next door in the dressing room, the sculptor Erika Verzutti is showing three stoneware ceramic sculptures cast from jackfruit, with bumpy skin and smooth interiors, inspired by pencils, Barbara Hepworth and architecture. ‘I call them ‘Brasilias,’’ she explains, ‘because they are Niemeyeresque.’ (As for Le Corbusier, Verzutti says that Brazilians have ‘internalised’ him.)

ABERTO4 runs until 8 June, but already, the team is planning upcoming editions. They are considering a 1970s spherical house by architect Eduardo Longo in São Paulo, as well as others in Europe. It's a pretty sure thing the event will be warmly welcomed wherever it goes. As Le Corbusier wrote in a 1962 letter, 'Brazil is one of those hospitable and generous places that one likes to be able to call a friend.'

Aberto4 runs until June 8 2025, aberto.art

Oscar Niemeyer (1907-2012), who died just a few days before his 105th birthday, had been one of the last living links to the first years of modernist architecture, a social idealist and unabashed aesthete whose career spanned seven decades. Since his first works in the late 1930s, Niemeyer had gone from being Brazil’s most exalted architect to voluntary exile and then back again. He is undoubtedly the world's most influential Brazilian designer, an architect who has never shied away from modernism's political roots, imbuing his sculpturally dramatic schemes with both symbolism and social purpose.

Entering the world of Oscar Niemeyer

Born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, where his practice continues to operate to this day, Niemeyer was prolific. His work, such as the Ravello auditorium in Italy, the Cathedral of Brasilia, the country's National Congress and the National Theatre, his prefabricated schools across Brazil, his complex at Ibirapuera Park in São Paulo and his Cultural Centre at Goiania – awarded Best Public Building in the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2007 – was immensely influential globally, defined 20th century Brazilian architecture, and frequently graced the pages of Wallpaper*.

Although initially he was strongly wedded to the formal simplicity of early modernism, it didn't take long for Niemeyer to find his own path, taking inspiration from the winding coastline, bold colours and sensual delights of his home town of Rio.

The history of an icon

Modern architecture's arrival in Brazil is usually carbon-dated to the Casa Modernista of 1928, built in São Paulo by Russian architect Gregori Warchavchik, who had moved to the country in 1923. In 1929, Le Corbusier undertook a South American lecture tour, returning to Brazil in 1936 to work on the Ministry of Education and Health Building in Rio, in collaboration with Lucio Costa and a team of young architects, including Niemeyer, Carlos Leao, Affonso Reidy, Jorge Moreira and Ernani Vasconcelos.

Widely acclaimed as the fount of the new Brazilian architecture, the building took European modernism as a starting point and presaged the Brazilian genre's move into free-form, concrete-fuelled exoticism. It wasn't to everyone's taste, not least the diehard modernists. The Bauhaus-trained Swiss functionalist Max Bill described Brazil's architecture as having 'thick pilotis, thin pilotis, pilotis of whimsical shapes lacking any structural rhyme or reason, disposed all over the place... works born of a spirit devoid of decency'.

Brazil embraced the new without reservation, remodelling its cities at the expense of many colonial-era structures. Niemeyer's own practice started small. His very first building was completed in 1937, while he was still working in Costa's studio and drawing inspiration from Le Corbusier. Modest in scale, traditionally modern in form, the Obra do Berço nursery is located in Rio's Lagoa, a prime neighbourhood beside the Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon. Le Corbusian in outlook, the nursery building conformed to the Swiss architect's famous five points: elevated up on pilotis, with a free plan, free façade, long runs of windows and a roof terrace.

Initially designed as a medical centre for expectant mothers, it now functions as both residential and day care for young children. The three-storey block is arranged around a north-facing courtyard with a generous roof garden and a large top-floor lounge above consultation rooms, clinics and wards. The west façade is shielded by a system of adjustable brise-soleils, allegedly reinstalled at the young architect's own cost after the initial fixed sun screens were built incorrectly.

It was Niemeyer's turn to travel in 1939, when he and Costa set out to study and work in New York, ostensibly to design the national pavilion for the New York World's Fair of 1939-40, but also to soak up the delirious modernity of the city. While works like the Obra do Berço owed much to the boxy white purism coming out of Europe, the strictly functional approach never gelled with the Brazilian climate and culture, and a more organic, plastic modernism emerged. As the century progressed, the nexus of Brazilian modernism shifted even further from its origins. American modernism had hit the big time as a hyper-efficient tool of capitalism and mass consumption, while the Brazilian model, led by Niemeyer's poetic utopianism, was always more socially considered and less afraid of expression for expression's sake.

Brazil's official ideology was now diametrically opposed to Niemeyer's inherently leftist sympathies. By 1966, his position in Rio had become untenable, and Niemeyer decamped to Paris, setting up a studio on the Champs-Élysées, finding fresh work around Europe, Africa and the Far East, and designing architectural bentwood and leather furniture for the Japanese manufacturer Tendo and for Mobilier International. However, work in Brazil hadn't completely evaporated.

In the late 1960s, Niemeyer undertook a commission for a new hotel in Rio's upscale district of São Conrado. Intent on preserving as much of the open space as possible, the design placed guest rooms in a 108m tall cylindrical tower set atop a concrete base and gardens landscaped by Roberto Burle Marx, an old collaborator of Niemeyer's. The Hotel Nacional opened in 1972 at the height of the military regime, its 510 rooms and convention centre surrounded by a sculptural landscape of concrete and greenery.

At the hotel's peak was an observation deck, she entered beneath a thick canopy of rain-streaked concrete and provided 360-degree views of the city, the sea and the mountains. The prominent site is now on Avenida Niemeyer, a coastal route that snakes its way south of the city past favelas, rocky coastline and the beach, the last forming the raw ingredients of Niemeyer's lifelong visual homage to the elements. The original hotel went bankrupt in 1995, and the building was abandoned, standing empty for many years – a brooding, concrete-topped, dark glass pillar, rising from the jungle at its base. It was not until 2017 that Hotel Nacional reopened, initially run by Mélia Hotels International, and now owned by private investors.

Niemeyer's political allegiances also came to the fore on his return to prominence. In the early 1980s, he was appointed by Leonel Brizola, governor of Rio de Janeiro state, to design a low-cost system for building schools. Brizola, with renowned anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro, proposed the creation of the Integrated Centres for Public Education, or CIEP, intended to bolster the number of schools in Rio's poorest regions, keeping children in education longer and providing facilities where nothing had previously existed.

Nakedly political in its aspirations, the CIEP programme used buildings made up of prefabricated concrete modules, while the teaching programme was specially developed and separate from existing public schools. There were problems; the project fell short of its initial targets, the large number of schools required ate through the budget, and teachers struggled to deal with the expansive classrooms.

Nevertheless, the schools, located close to main roads and boasting distinctive concrete façades, were a statement of intent. Each school used a template of three structures: a main building housing classrooms and a cafeteria, a gymnasium that doubled up as a cultural centre, and a library with additional residential accommodation. The very first school, the CIEP Tancredo Neves in Catete, Rio de Janeiro, is still standing.

Completed in 1983, the building is robust and modest despite its scale. The massive prefabrication job was farmed out to private engineering companies, with up to 300 cubic metres of concrete a day being poured into slabs. At full tilt, a single factory could produce enough parts for one and a half schools a week. Although the CIEP school programme never garnered the global acclaim of his work in Brasilia or his cultural projects in Rio, the mix of concrete and political principles is a core component of Niemeyer's career.

Niemeyer’s role in shaping the new Brazil is well chronicled. Together with Costa, he designed Brasilia, a project which contributed significantly to his expansive opus of over 500 buildings. The extraordinary range of Niemeyer's aesthetic is demonstrated time and time again, with his later works, in particular, showing a strongly symbolic sensibility, long before the fashion for iconic cultural statements gripped the world's cities.

His influence on the country's architecture is still strongly felt, and his longevity means that most of Brazil's practitioners are still subconsciously playing second fiddle. His body of work stands as an enormous achievement, instilling a great sense of pride in all generations of Brazilian architects and forming the bedrock of a design scene with a modern sensibility quite unlike that of any other country.

9 key Niemeyer buildings

Edifício Copan

Where: São Paulo
When: 1966

Niemeyer is known for his sweeping curves and organic shapes, and the large-scale application of this approach on Edifício Copan, a multi-family housing scheme in São Paulo, is emblematic of his work. Impressive yet soft, spanning 32 floors and 1,160 apartments, there is nothing 'boutique' about this project – apart of course from the bespoke architecture, which has made it into history books.

Ibirapuera Auditorium

Where: São Paulo
When: 2002

Oscar Niemeyer and landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx worked together on Ibirapuera Park, one of the most famous green lungs in São Paulo. Niemeyer's contribution includes the Ibirapuera Auditorium, a striking, for its crisp minimalism, volume defined by a single sloped shape, and a vibrant red coloured entrance whose door appears peeled off and floating in the wind above it.

Niterói Contemporary Art Museum

Where: Niterói
When: 1996

The striking Niterói Contemporary Art Museum (Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói – MAC) is one of Niemeyer's later works, completed in 1996. Created with the help of structural engineer Bruno Contarini, the building's main body looks like a flying saucer, hovering high up from the ground and overlooking its coastal site.

Palácio do Planalto

Where: Brasília
When: 1960

If Palácio da Alvorada is where the President of Brazil lives, Palácio do Planalto is where he works. The office building is one of Brasilia's biggest landmarks – for its function as well as its striking modernist looks. It is an official part of the Brasília World Heritage Site, as designated by Unesco in 1987.

Palácio da Alvorada

Where: Brasília
When: 1958

Palácio da Alvorada is the official residence of the Brazilian president. Surrounded by water, it sits on a peninsula by Paranoá Lake. The structure looks low and linear but comprises three levels, and beyond the residential wing, it also includes majestic reception spaces for special events and state entertaining.

National Congress of Brazil

Where: Brasília
When: 1960

The powerful geometries of the National Congress building include a semi-sphere on the left, hosting the seat of the Senate, and a semi-sphere on the right, where the seat of the Chamber of Deputies lies. Two vertical towers between these two elements add drama and monumentality to this modernist design.

Cathedral of Brasília

Where: Brasília
When: completed 1970

The Roman Catholic cathedral of Brazil's newly – at the time – inaugurated capital, Brasilia, features a Niemeyer design, coming to life with some powerful engineering gymnastics by Brazilian structural engineer Joaquim Cardozo. The hyperboloid lines of the structure were constructed from 16 concrete columns.

United Nations Headquarters

Where: New York
When: 1952

Another result of teamwork in Niemeyer's portfolio is the iconic United Nations headquarters in new York. Ten architects and numerous consultants are credited for its inception, which dates back to January 1947. The ten architects were ND Bassov (Soviet Union), Gaston Brunfaut (Belgium), Ernest Cormier (Canada), Charles Le Corbusier (France) Su-Ch’eng Liang (China), Sven Markelius (Sweden), Oscar Niemeyer (Brazil), Howard Robertson (United Kingdom), GA Soilleux (Australia), and Julio Vilamajo (Uruguay).

Church of Saint Francis of Assisi, Pampulha

Where: Belo Horizonte
When: 1943

The mesmerising curves of the Church of Saint Francis of Assisi in Pampulha are a Niemeyer hallmark. Its completion in 1943 was accompanied by an interior mural by Candido Portinari, while the site also features landscaping by Roberto Burle Marx.

Interviewing Oscar Niemeyer at 102, in 2010

Wallpaper*: Your work is always immediately associated with Brazil. How 'Brazilian' do you consider your buildings to be?

Oscar Niemeyer: Modern architecture adopts a more international language, maybe in a more emphatic manner than it has ever occurred in any other period of architecture history. However, Brazilian culture is very powerful and is present in the imagination of the architects of this country. I believe I have not strayed too far from that: in Brasilia, Palácio da Alvorada suggests elements from our past: the horizontal direction of the façade, a large porch, a small church that, at the end of the composition, reminds us of our old farm villas.

W*: We are looking at Brazil at what seems to be a time of optimism, with the Olympics approaching in 2016; what opportunities do you see, what should the country make the most of?

Niemeyer: I believe that the whole country, particularly the civil construction and tourism industries, should make the most of the proximity of the Olympic Games.

W*: Which commission do you consider to be a key project in your career?

Niemeyer: The most important project for my career was the buildings I created for Pampulha, commissioned by Juscelino Kubitschek when he was mayor of Belo Horizonte. In those works, particularly in the small church and Casa do Baile restaurant, the visual vocabulary of my architecture started to define itself. Those large curved coverings started to descend in straight lines, in a surprising manner, thus conferring them with a different character that was justifiable through the issue of their structural forces. In other instances, they unfolded through repeated unpredictable curves created by my architect's imagination; it was on paper, when I sketched those works, that I made my protest against all rationalist, boring, barely inventive architecture, which had quickly spread from the United States to Japan.

W*: Some of your projects, such as the CIEP schools, are not as well-known outside Brazil as larger works like Brasilia or Pampulha. What role have slightly lower-profile projects like these played in your career?

Niemeyer: The CIEP schools in Rio de Janeiro are prefab public schools and, to me, the most important character of those schools is not their architecture; rather, it is the idea championed by my dear friend Darcy Ribeiro that children should stay in school all day long, where they should be provided with sports facilities and libraries, as well as some quiet spaces, crucial for their studies, which are often lacking in their homes. Regarding architecture itself, I sought, even with prefabs, to create structures that would be unique to them, so that they stand out among neighbouring buildings, thus ensuring they show the importance of the venture.

W*: Your office is still working at full speed, and a few members of your family are also architects; how important is it for you that your work and firm are supported and continued by family?

Niemeyer: In my office, I am the only architect responsible for creating initial projects. Two great-grandsons of mine work there; I delegate some project developments to them. They are young architects just starting their careers, which I consider promising.

W*: Are there any Brazilian architects whose work you follow?

Niemeyer: I cannot fail to answer this question: a Brazilian architect I follow is my friend João Filgueiras Lima, aka Lele. His talent and his competence justify my interest. Some of his projects were presented by Nosso Caminho cultural magazine, edited by me and my wife, Vera Niemeyer.

W*: Do you have a daily routine? Do you go to the office every day? What role does architecture play in your life?

Niemeyer: I do have a kind of routine. I wake up fairly early and try to be at the office around 10am. I invariably have scheduled appointments, but I always set aside some time to dedicate to my sketches, which is the essential base to creating my projects. I have lunch at about 12.30pm. During the afternoon, I dedicate a few hours to writing articles and working on Nosso Caminho. At the end of the afternoon, friends come to visit. I go back home and eat dinner around 7pm. Architecture still occupies considerable space in my life.

W*: What would you wish for the future of Brazilian architecture?

Niemeyer: That it always responds, in a creative manner, to technical and social progress. That its professionals rely on their creative intuition without being afraid of anything. Intuition is responsible for unveiling life's secrets, for understanding how human beings, these highly unprotected beings, are able to face their drama.

niemeyer.org.br

When Bloco Arquitetos was called upon for a modernist São Paulo apartment renovation, the practice jumped at the opportunity. Based in Brasília, the studio was founded by Daniel Mangabeira, Henrique Coutinho and Matheus Seco. As well as designing sleek pieces of contemporary architecture such as the Casa do Tijolos Brancos, the trio has a keen interest in the history and legacy of their home town, and their country's acclaimed architectural heritage.

So it’s no surprise the team found appeal in the historic 230 sq m apartment in the Higienópolis district of the Brazilian metropolis, an upmarket area rich in architectural treasures, from shining examples of paulistano art deco designs to modernist tower blocks.

Tour this revived modernist São Paulo apartment

The apartment in question is situated in a building by modernist architecture representative Rubens Camargo de Monteiro, a tower block located just around the corner from the Museu de Arte Brasileira, itself full of midcentury treasures. The property had a handful of striking original features, including a solid ipê wood parquet floor laid in a double herringbone pattern, which the team preserved and restored.

'Rubens de Monteiro worked in São Paulo during the 1950s and 1960s,' explain the architects. 'His Cuiabá building, where this apartment is located, was completed in the early 1960s in Higienópolis. He was also part of the team of architects that were involved in the construction of one of Oscar Niemeyer's most important works in São Paulo, the OCA exhibition hall at the Ibirapuera Park. He was one of the partners of the construction company that built it.'

The architects also peeled back some of the layers accumulated over the years: the plaster on the perimeter walls was removed to expose the original solid brick, while a thin concrete ceiling was carefully taken down to reveal a series of structural beams that were incorporated into the interior design.

‘Undoubtedly, the ceiling is our favourite element in this project,' say the architects. 'The beautiful structure was originally hidden by a thin layer of concrete that had no structural function. It worked like a suspended ceiling. We removed the thin slab so we could expose the beautiful sequence of parallel beams that form the ceiling structure.'

Having capitalised on the property’s original features, the architects then focused on rethinking the existing layout to accommodate contemporary family life. The key element of their brief included increasing the reception space and better connecting the kitchen with the dining room.

To do so they reconfigured the original, compartmentalised layout, which had a pantry between the kitchen and the living room, a small service bathroom, a single suite, and a central vestibule. The architects removed the pantry to create a TV room and larger kitchen, connected to the dining room by sliding doors and complete with new terrazzo flooring. They also created a larger suite by combining two existing bedrooms.

The new interiors were furnished with the owner’s existing collection of contemporary art and Brazilian design, including ‘Mole’ and ‘Oscar’ armchairs and the ‘Mocho’ bench by Sérgio Rodrigues; the ‘Jangada’ armchair by Jean Gillon; and the ‘Pétala’ coffee table and ‘Onda’ bench designed by Jorge Zalszupin.

These were combined with newly acquired pieces, such as a ‘Geometric’ dining table and ‘Composé’ sofa by Cremme, ‘Moss’ dining chairs by Punto Mobile, and an ‘Icon’ shelf by Jader Almeida.

Although Bloco Arquitetos is based in Brasília, Brazil's modernist capital, it is expanding its operations to other cities and abroad. 'We are currently finishing a house in Bahia, Brazil, which was entirely designed using glued laminated wood structure,' say the trio. 'At the same time, we have finished a house project in New Jersey, USA, and we are currently developing a house in Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal. We mainly work on residential projects, but we have also finished the interior design of a Hilton hotel in the state of São Paulo and some office spaces in São Paulo city itself.'

bloco.arq.br

Perkins&Will has launched Oscar Ibirapuera, a new residential offering in São Paulo, located a stone’s throw from Niemeyer’s landmark namesake park project. The housing scheme, comprising a complex of high rises and a ground level designed for greenery, communal areas and social activity, takes the grand master's modernist architecture teachings and gives them a 21st-century twist, offering a fresh vision of living in the Brazilian metropolis. 

Perkins&Will on Niemeyer’s Oscar Ibirapuera

Completed in 1954, the Ibirapuera Park by Oscar Niemeyer is a well-known part of the Brazilian modernist's legacy. Perkins&Will was appointed to create Oscar Ibirapuera, placed on the green expanse’s borders, blending its verdant nature with a high-end living proposition. 

Commissioned by property developer Trisul, the project includes apartments spanning 186 sq m, 227 sq m and 233 sq m, featuring three or four bedrooms and up to four en suites.

'The floor plan was conceived so that the living room could [include] 9m at its front completely devoid of pillars, providing a panoramic view of Ibirapuera, something unique in the city,' says Douglas Tolaine, design director at Perkins&Will.

Communal areas – all expertly designed by architect Fernanda Marques – are equally well thought out, ranging from a luxuriously double-height gourmet party room, outdoor and indoor pools, a solarium, dry and wet saunas, a spa, a fitness room, a pilates room, a playground, a playroom, a game room and a bike rack.

Features throughout Oscar Ibirapuera draw on Brazilian midcentury modernism styles – movable brises-soleils on the façades, timber panels, white-coloured render and soft, curved forms, all gently nod to Niemeyer's work. 

perkinswill.com

Lightness, experimentation, reduction: such are the principles behind Stone Island’s ’Ghost’ line, seeing details stripped back and every element on the garment – including the brand’s signature compass badge – rendered in pure monochrome. 

It makes Oscar Niemeyer’s 1970s-built Palazzo Mondadori in Milan, a vast modernist office where monumental concrete arches emerge from the surface of an artificial lake, an apt backdrop for a new series of images of the collection captured by seminal British artist and photographer Nick Waplington (the campaign is revealed by Wallpaper* for the first time today).

Joseph Grima photographed by Nick Waplington for Stone Island

Described as a ’response’ to Stone Island Ghost’s latest collection, the series stars the architect Joseph Grima in what the brand describes as a continuing ’research’ project into members of the Stone Island community (another recent campaign, released the same day as the brand’s first runway show in January 2024, captured the Stone Island ’famiglia’ from actor Jason Statham to musician Dave).

Grima, who is co-founder of the architecture and research studio Space Caviar and creative director of Design Academy Eindhoven, said he came to be involved in the project through Stone Island’s creative director Ferdinando Verderi, ’an old friend’. ’I didn’t know Nick previously but I’ve always loved his photography. It all sounded crazy and fun so I jumped on board,’ Grima tells Wallpaper*.

The choice of Palazzo Mondadori was his own, ’mainly for the opportunity to explore it properly, which I’d been meaning to do for years’, he says of the building, which he describes as ‘insanely amazing’. ’I basically spent the day on what felt like a sci-fi film set, acting out the part of some lost and confused interplanetary design critic who had travelled a few light years to experience the seductive architectural wonders of a nearby galaxy,’ he says.

’At the outset, I didn’t really know anything about what I’d be wearing, but in retrospect, Stone Island’s Ghost collection felt like it was designed to be worn in such an extreme environment – Nick’s main job was to keep my feet on the ground and stop me getting carried away by my fantasies of interstellar cinematic glory.’

This season, the Stone Island Ghost collection largely centres on research into two fabrics, cotton-derived Cupro Raso, which has the hand-feel of silk, and the contrasting organic cotton O-VENTILE, a fabric used by the military for its breathable and waterproof properties. Here, it makes up versions of archetypal trench coats and field jackets.

‘I enjoyed the playfulness of the pieces – it was very liberating to be stepping into such futuristic clothing,’ Grima continues. ‘My favourite was the white outfit, perhaps because we shot that one on the top-floor terrace. [It was] brilliant, unforgettable stuff.’

The S/S 2024 Stone Island Ghost collection is available from stoneisland.com.

stoneisland.com

East Architecture Studio is the latest entry to the Wallpaper* Architects’ Directory 2023, our annual round-up of exciting emerging architecture studios. Based in Lebanon and the UAE, this is a young practice with a thriving, multi-award-winning portfolio – including The Capsule Retreat, seen below. 

Who: East Architecture Studio

Architects Nicolas Fayad and Charles Kettaneh joined forces in 2015 and founded East Architecture Studio, the dynamic practice with one base in Lebanon, and another in the UAE. The practice now has worked across four continents and has won recognitions including the Aga Khan Award for Architecture 2022 for its Oscar Niemeyer Guest House Renovation project in Tripoli, Lebanon. 

Remaining small and agile while excelling in their field is important for the pair. They say: 'What sets us apart as a studio is our ability to tackle significant projects with a relatively small yet highly skilled team. We excel in adapting and designing within diverse contexts and environments, allowing us to create tailored solutions that perfectly align with each project's unique needs. We take pride in being a dynamic and forward-thinking architectural firm.'

The geographical and cultural mix their practice enables enriches their work. 'At East Architecture Studio, what truly motivates us is the opportunity to work with inspiring clients who share our passion for innovative design,' the two co-founders say. 'The chance to collaborate with individuals and teams from diverse backgrounds allows for a synergistic engagement and encourages us to push the boundaries of what is possible. 

‘We thrive on the energy that comes from partnering with both established and emerging artists, and being introduced to their unique perspectives and artistic sensibilities. Additionally, we relish challenges, as they fuel our drive for continuous evolution and enable us to find ingenious solutions to complex problems. The combination of these motivating factors fuels our enthusiasm, propels our creativity, and ensures that every project we undertake is a testament to the studio's dedication and commitment to delivering exceptional concepts.'

What: The Capsule Retreat

Among their latest residential commissions is The Capsule Retreat, a generous 350 sq m residence in the rural Zabbougha region of Lebanon. The scheme, a holiday home for a private client, sits in a plot that overlooks the coniferous pine forests of Mount Lebanon. The architects sought to balance through their design this rich natural context with the owners' contemporary needs and art collection. 

The project celebrates exposed concrete, making the most of the material's sculptural robustness by carving round edges, curves and sweeping openings that take in the outdoors. 

An open plan kitchen, dining and living space sits at the heart of the home, with the two hearths of the house, the chimney and the stove, located facing each other, creating a dynamic warmth – while signalling the owner's passion for cooking and entertaining.

Why: Wallpaper* Architects’ Directory 2023

Conceived in 2000 as an international index of emerging architectural talent, the Wallpaper* Architects’ Directory is our annual listing of promising practices from across the globe. While always championing the best and most promising young studios, over the years, the project has showcased inspiring work with an emphasis on the residential realm. Now including more than 500 alumni, the Architects’ Directory is back for its 23rd edition. Join us as we launch this year’s survey – 20 young studios from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Congo, Ecuador, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, Mozambique, Pakistan, Senegal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UAE, the UK, the USA and Vietnam, with plenty of promise, ideas and exciting architecture.

eastarchitecture.net 

The 34th São Paulo Bienal (4 September – 5 Dec 2021) was a 91-artist-strong cross-media exhibition, which delved into political narratives through four themes. The main site for the presentation was the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion in Parque do Ibirapuera, its Oscar Nieymeyer-designed home since 1957. 

The 34th São Paulo Bienal: ‘Though it's dark, still I sing’

This December, a curated exhibition of work by fourteen artists from the exhibition ‘Though It's dark, still I sing’ has moved from its tour of South America to Europe for the finale in its ten-part travelling exhibition, held at Les Forges, part of art hub Luma Arles in France. 

Split into a series of thematic strands, the show explored the statements ‘The Portraits of Frederick Douglass’, ‘The Death Watch by Hélio Oiticica’, ‘The Bell of Ouro Preto’ and ‘Tikmū’ūn Songs’. The themes, selected by Jacopo Crivelli Visconti, general curator of the 34th Bienal and his curatorial team, aim to shine new light on the artworks, referring to pivotal moments in history and contemplating our collective futures.

The exhibition explores how Immaterial objects hold narratives with compelling histories, and prompts conversations on post-colonial issues, environmental concerns and Indigenous cosmologies. The show is posed as a journey through time and space, with its opening coinciding with a weekend of talks titled ‘Realities of Science Fiction II’, which delve into speculative fiction as a mode of resistance, alongside Afrofuturism.

The selected artists hail from seven countries and comprise Victor Anicet, Zózimo Bulbul, Seba Calfuqueo, Manthia Diawara, Jaider Esbell, Noa Eshkol, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Carmela Gross, Sueli Maxakali, Gala Porras-Kim, Alice Shintani, Amie Siegel, Regina Silveira, and Daiara Tukano.

‘Though it’s dark, still I sing: Works from the 34th Bienal de São Paulo’ in LUMA Arles will be on view from 16 December 2022, to 5 March 2023.

LUMA Arles, Parc des Ateliers, Les Forges, 35 avenue Victor Hugo, 13200 Arles; luma.org

Brazil’s long-established agency for the preservation of culturally significant sites and buildings, the Institute for National Artistic and Historical Heritage (IPHAN), has been successful in protecting many of its modern architectural icons, among them Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasília Cathedral and Affonso Eduardo Reidy’s Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro. 

But in a country with plenty of historically significant architecture – from baroque to brutalist – there have been misses, the result of politics, scarce resources, and other challenges that every country faces in its preservation efforts. 

Most notably in São Paulo, the opulent mansions built by sugar and coffee barons in the mid-to-late 19th and early 20th centuries have all but disappeared, despite their unique place in the city’s history. Progress has been made in the form of legal protection for the few homes that remain. But protection is one thing, restoration is quite another. The hefty bill that comes with the latter often falls on patrons of the arts such as Carlos Jereissati. 

‘These buildings are part of our DNA. They are part of who we are, the history of our city, and broader Brazil. We can’t let them disappear,’ says the former CEO and current board member of Iguatemi, the company that introduced the shopping mall to Brazil during the late 1960s. ‘We need to lead by example in these things, to show the bright side of our culture, in the past and now, during our time.’

Casa Higienópolis: Iguatemi's latest revival project

Jereissati’s commitment to preservation has only grown with practice. Iguatemi’s latest revival project, Casa Higienópolis, is the company’s third. In 2014, he acquired an essential but overlooked steel and glass home inspired by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House and restored it to create Casa Jereissati. 

Earlier this year, working with Lissa Carmona of furniture maker Etel, he transformed modernist icon Jorge Zalszupin’s former home (a key example of modern Brazilian design) into Casa Zalszupin, a museum dedicated to the designer’s legacy. 

Casa Higienópolis is located in its namesake neighbourhood, one of the city’s most noble. The five-storey, 2,400 sq m, French neoclassical-style mansion was commissioned in 1927 by Carlos Leôncio Magalhães, a wealthy coffee farmer, entrepreneur and financier of the era, known as the ‘King of Coffee’. Today, the mansion  sits in stark contrast to its surroundings. Higienópolis comprises mostly midcentury high-rises, such as Edifício Louveira and Edifício Bretagne, which helped redefine this upscale neighbourhood in the late 1950s. 

Inside, neoclassical design mingles with Brazilian flair. The mansion’s 40 rooms are replete with French-inspired period details, including intricate, handcarved woodwork and ornate plaster ceilings. It has all been painstakingly restored, providing a stunning juxtaposition to Zalszupin’s modern furniture used throughout, and a portion of Iguatemi’s contemporary art collection. 

Highlights include works by Rio de Janeiro-based artist Chiara Banfi, who looks to the world of music to inform her installations and sculptures. It all gives visitors a deep and varied sense of Brazilian history, a gift to not only Iguatemi’s customers and partners, but also the city.

In keeping with its restored sister properties, Casa Higienópolis will be used for everything from fashion events and VIP client luncheons to accommodation for visiting fashion industry figures; it will also host an extensive calendar of public events. The first is a new architectural walking tour of the neighbourhood, created by Iguatemi and operated out of Casa Higienópolis. 

‘We are not typical shopping mall owners. We don’t just rent out spaces, but are committed to inspiring our clients and neighbours,’ says Jereissati. ‘My vision for Iguatemi has always been about celebrating the best of Brazil.

iguatemi.com.br

A version of this article appears in the December 2022 Entertaining Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

In 2003, Athenian artist Andreas Angelidakis found himself in Paris with Olivier Zahm, founder of Purple magazine. On Zahm’s suggestion, he visited the French Communist Party HQ building, designed by Brazilian modernist Oscar Niemeyer as a gift to the party. A trained architect himself, Angelidakis found it nothing less than ‘sensational and transcendent’. So this year when Denis Pernet, curator of the itinerant art programme Audemars Piguet Contemporary, invited him to create an installation in its auditorium, Angelidakis seized the opportunity. He decided to expand his series Soft Ruins, the modular exhibition furniture he conceived in the same year he’d first seen the building, to form ‘a disco monastery worksite’. An exemplar of how the Brazilians worked organic forms into modernism, the auditorium roof protrudes up through the premises’ front lawn as a dome inspired by a pregnant woman’s belly. Inside is a womb of grass-green carpet and diffused white light that will house the artist’s multimedia fantasy titled Center for the Critical Appreciation of Antiquity.

Conversationally, Angelidakis is patient and precise. ‘This exhibition has a mystical geek vibe,’ he says when we meet in Athens in August, wearing leopard-print shorts and sitting on a sofa block digitally printed with an antique photo of a Greek column. His top-floor apartment beside the National Archaeological Museum is an Aladdin’s cave of tests. Over a 30-year career, Angelidakis has taken part in numerous biennials, panels with Hans Ulrich Obrist, booths at Art Basel, lectures at Columbia, and published a book titled Internet Suburbia. He’s been an architect, teacher, and curator. ‘I don’t see exhibitions as a display but an active ingredient to be played with.’ He remembers that in 2017, when he showed Soft Ruins at Documenta 14, security guards called him because visitors were moving pieces of the installation around: ‘I said, “Perfect!”’

In today’s version, his soft collapsed columns are accompanied by daybeds printed with archaeological pamphlets, scattered around a scaffold column rising through shadows of smoke and lights. On the auditorium screen, an infinity tunnel video extends the space like a portal. A metal container – resembling those used in shipping, building sites, and refugee camps – houses a ‘gift shop’ of Greek figurines and touristic objets.

He calls this conglomerate ‘a system for a soft stylite home’, explaining that a stylite was a monk who sat in prayer atop a pillar (stylos) to be closer to god. He recounts how on top of the Temple of Olympian Zeus – the largest temple in ancient Athens – there used to be a hut, housing a stylite. It was removed in 1870, when the barely half-century-old modern Greek government pursued an archaeological policy that sought to eradicate almost 2,000 years of historical adaptations in a bid to produce an idealised Grecian aesthetic that would support a unified national identity in the aftermath of Ottoman rule.

Along with other elements of the temple’s social ecosystem (including coffee huts, trading, and diverse ceremonial practices) the hut was erased, not only from physical existence, but also from documentation. Nineteenth-century photographs of the ruin were tampered with as part of this national branding exercise that sought to portray Greece as a blanched monocultural fantasy, embodying the classical architectural ideals adored by the West.

In the centre of Niemeyer’s auditorium, Angelidakis’ stylite pillar takes the form of a scaffold tower with his signature digital print of an Ionian column draped on one side, and a construction chute hung down the other. Athenian buildings have recently undergone much repurposing, to which the chute refers. Atop the pillar sits a metal container hut in signal yellow to match the chute.

And what of the monk who would be in the hut? ‘It could be any of us, doing our YouTube meditations on the sofa’ says the artist. Angelidakis enlists clubby elements, pointing out that people have gravitated towards both ancient temples and modern nightclubs in search of ritual highs. ‘You can be up on a column or on medical cannabis or anti-depressants, social media, coffee, wine – there are different ways of escaping reality.’

The artist remembers when the Temple of Olympian Zeus was cruising territory, and the installation’s video evokes classic gay club aesthetics that combine the idealised male forms of Grecian statues with the escapist positivity of disco. Angelidakis ordered 3D printed figurines online, with Ionian column-tops (‘the gayer column, based on a flower, with swirls’) positioned like hats, collars, skirts or pedestals on their white plastic bodies. ‘Ken the stylite,’ he jokes about these kitsch miniatures, which he filmed spinning on tiny podiums before layering them into the club portal video that beams out countertenor Klaus Nomi’s bittersweet cover of Donna Summer’s I Feel Love – as emblematic to club culture as columns are to architecture. ‘Nomi released that track when he was dying of Aids.’

Angelidakis’ archive diving is executed with intellectual expertise, but his motivations for pursuing it are more personal. ‘I’m also excavating myself. I’m always investigating why I’m so preoccupied with antiquity with my psychoanalyst.’ His father, a buildings engineer, used to make him visit archaeological sites when they hosted guests in Crete. He’s not immune to Greece’s pervasive nostalgia, nor to the queer community’s melancholic mythologies, both of which bandage wounds.

By retrieving the stylite from history’s off-cuts pile and blending it with other suppressed cultural elements, Angelidakis brings aspects of the urban environment out of the shadows to be reintegrated – while you enjoy yourself! Lie on columns! Recall club highs! Espace Niemeyer is often referred to as retro-futuristic, an early-space-age vision of today. Angelidakis’ style is also retro-futuristic in its own way, quoting from the little utopias that 1970s and 80s clubs provided, including their historicist impulses.  Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is an ongoing reference, as is Superstudio. ‘I like mixing science fiction with antiquity.’

One of the booklets in the container ‘gift shop’ is titled Future Memory Club. He’s overlaid pages from antique archaeology pamphlets with his own fragmentary musings, featuring current keywords like Ukraine, monkeypox and micro-dosing. ‘I asked the Archaeological Society if I could re-print the original pages but they said no.’ Perhaps they were nervous about his approach. ‘People idolise ancient Greece as the birthplace of democracy but you had to be a wealthy male over 35 to be an Athenian citizen and vote.’

Angelidakis is interesting for many reasons – his progressive processing of Athenian conditions, his apartment’s funky bricolage furniture, the ‘queer brutalist’ island house he’s just built for himself, the intense relationship he shares with his fierce Pomeranian, Lupo. He was studying architecture at Columbia when it first abolished the use of hand tools, and asked students to design only on computers. ‘I was lucky to be part of that. The beginning of virtuality.’ Texture mapping, rendering, and video compositing produce his style, and he’s been ‘into digital archeology’ for 20 years’.

It was 1965 when the PCF (Parti Communiste Français) commissioned Niemeyer to envision an inspiring headquarters from which to lead the leftist future they thought they’d see. A member of its Brazilian counterpart, the architect had just left Rio de Janeiro for Paris in self-imposed exile from his homeland’s right-wing government. Located on Place du Colonel Fabien, named after a French communist Second World War resistance hero, the headquarters opened in 1981, one of seven buildings in France by the architect, the last of which opened only this year at Château La Coste in Aix-en-Provence. Espace Niemeyer combines the formal clarity and lean lines of the broader modernist vision with free-form curves and expressive flourishes, resulting in a building of both restrained modesty and charismatic flair.

The Espace Niemeyer foundation was set up after the building was classified as a historical monument in 2007 to ensure its maintenance, raising funds by renting out its exquisitely designed environments. Arts organisations, media companies, and luxury brands have staged productions here, including Netflix and Prada. Curator Pernet’s interest is both aesthetic and philanthropic: paying to exhibit there contributes to its preservation and opens it to the public. ‘I wanted to bring Angelidakis’ Athenian perspective on cities and culture to a Paris audience,’ says Pernet. ‘The way he uses urbanism and digitality to comment on society means you don’t have to be an art world insider to understand his work.’ Angelidakis’ preoccupations with utopian fantasies and architectural ruins fit neatly with how we’ve come to look back on the visions of midcentury architects, including Niemeyer, and the dilapidated condition many of their buildings are in today.

That Audemars Piguet, the last-standing family-owned Swiss watch brand, has invited a deconstructivist Athenian contemporary artist to exhibit in Paris’ communist party HQ, designed by Niemeyer under protest exile, while contemporary European governments lean in increasingly right-wing directions, perfectly reflects the collapse of meaning in which culture is immersed now. This irreverent mashing together creates a sublimely entertaining presentation of decadence, performing Angelidakis’ theme of ruination and reflecting a post-ideological condition. ‘Crisis has been one of my subjects,’ says the artist. ‘Postmodernism was the beginning of our current notion of crisis as something recurring that’s part of our civilisation. In constant crisis, what’s wrong and right? You may as well go all the way and make a niche temple featuring a stylite monk in the Niemeyer dome.’

INFORMATION

The ‘Center for the Critical Appreciation of Antiquity,’ commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary, runs from 11-30 October 2022, Espace Niemeyer. espace-niemeyer.fr; audemarspiguet.com

ADDRESS

2 Pl. du Colonel Fabien, 
75019 Paris

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Nestled in the bucolic, vineyard-dappled wonderland surrounding Château La Coste sits what is claimed to be Oscar Niemeyer’s final building. This is contested, but regardless, the two-part pavilion that opened earlier this year is a quintessentially Niemeyer structure: sinuous curves, crisp white concrete walls reflected in a shallow adjacent pool, and a near 360-degree glass facade, adjoining a cylindrical auditorium. 

Such a significant building calls for a significant inaugural exhibition, a task to which British artist Annie Morris has risen. Co-curated by Georgina Cohen, her exhibition is a congregation of the artist’s Stacks, totemic towers of vibrantly pigmented spheres of varying sizes. There’s a rhythm to these works, alternating between precarity and stability, and despite their vibrancy, they carry a more poignant symbolic weight. As the artist told us in a 2021 interview, Stacks were initially created in grief following the tragic stillbirth of her first child in 2014, but have since evolved into a ‘joyous obsession’. 

At the heart of this obsession is raw pigment, which Morris hand-sources and applies to the surface of her plaster and sand spheres. ‘I have always been drawn to raw pigment. I wanted to try and capture pigment as it is, and before it dries,’ Morris told us last year. ‘It has a certain lightness and richness that feels very alive and fragile.’ Raw pigments create a velvet-like surface that swallows light. There’s Morris’ frequented palette: ultramarine, viridian and ochre – and more recently, the addition of lavender and pale greens inspired by recent visits to Provençal vineyards.

Morris’ smaller, newer sculptures – often comprising a three-sphere stack – carry more figurative qualities, suggesting the female form or pregnant body. The pigment experimentation continues in a group of paintings, which are assembled to form a vast, 15m-wide mural. These are accompanied by tapestries and drawings, which, like Morris’ sculptures, occupy a space between figuration and abstraction. 

Outdoors, in the latest addition to Château La Coste’s vast art and architecture trail, Morris has installed a monumental 6m-bronze Stack sculpture, which sits face-to-face with Louise Bourgeois’ Crouching Spider, creating a cross-generational dialogue on themes of femininity, motherhood and birth. 

As Morris says of her new show, ‘My sculptures are about holding onto something that's fallen, and to express the hope and defiance of life. The vibrant pigment on the surface is a way of trying to freeze the moment when paint hasn’t yet dried, and is caught in its most raw form. They assemble to create abstract paintings that escalate upwards and express the fragility we all feel in our lives.’

INFORMATION
Annie Morris’ exhibition runs until September 2022 at Château La Coste. chateau-la-coste.com

ADDRESSVIEW GOOGLE MAPS

2750 Route de La Cride
13610 Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade

The latest addition to Château La Coste’s ever increasing collection of architectural pavilions and art installations is billed as the final project drawn by Oscar Niemeyer. As recently as 2020, the owner of a Leipzig tram factory proudly claimed that a 40ft concrete and glass sphere, pinned to the top corner of one of his buildings and housing a restaurant and bar, represented Niemeyer’s last design (see W*241). As it turns out, Paddy McKillen, the founder of Château La Coste, has simply taken longer to finish his rather more substantial project. And even now, ten years after Niemeyer’s death, just a few days short of his 105th birthday, there are still schemes being worked on that carry his name.

Set in the rolling landscape of Provence and home to works by the likes of Frank Gehry, Tracey Emin, Tadao Ando, Louise Bourgeois, Jenny Holzer and Ai Weiwei, Château La Coste now has an 80-seat auditorium that sits inside a circular white concrete drum, attached like a hinge to a teardrop-shaped, 4,000 sq ft glass-walled gallery. It sits in a dip in the vineyards that surround the hotel at Château La Coste, and is reached by a path that curls languidly through the vines, entering the pavilion across a shallow reflecting pool. These are motifs familiar from Niemeyer’s earlier buildings. He used water everywhere, from Brasilia to his office building for Mondadori on the edge of Milan. The confrontation of a drum-shaped solid element, with transparent free form glass, is a paraphrase of the cultural centre in Le Havre that he finished in 1983.

Niemeyer’s astonishingly long architectural career began in the 1930s when he was a young assistant in a team supervised by Le Corbusier designing Brazil’s ministry of education in Rio de Janeiro. In the 1940s, he met Juscelino Kubitschek, then mayor of Belo Horizonte, the city in which he designed his first independent buildings. After the war, Niemeyer sparred with Le Corbusier to shape the multi-authored United Nations building in New York. When Kubitschek became Brazil’s president, he appointed Niemeyer as the architect of his new capital city, Brasilia.

As a communist, Niemeyer left the country in 1964, when the army took over the government. While in exile, he built the headquarters of the French Communist Party in Paris, a venue later selected by Miuccia Prada in which to show a collection. He is certainly the only architect to have been awarded both the Pritzker Prize and the Lenin Peace Prize.

After 2006, Niemeyer became increasingly frail, though that did not stop him from marrying his 60-year-old assistant Vera Lucia Cabreira at the age of 98. In 2011, McKillen visited his studio in Rio, above the beach at Copacabana, to talk about Niemeyer’s project for him. ‘Oscar beckoned me towards a picture in his office of swimmers on Ipanema Beach, suggesting the building would be inspired by the female form,’ McKillen recalls. ‘I remember clearly his many questions on the vineyards at Château La Coste, and how he expressed his love for a good glass of red wine.’

By that time, the architect’s sight was deteriorating. He relied on his sense of touch to feel architectural models, and lightboxes to read the drawings made for him by his staff. He could no longer manage to do his party piece for the flow of visitors who came to see him. Until he was well over 90, he would ask them to name any of his many buildings, produce a pen and, without pausing to think, capture its essence with a single fluent black line on a sheet of butcher’s paper pinned to an easel. His assistant would unpin it, fold it up and present it as a gift.

Niemeyer had long since stopped travelling. He never saw the Serpentine Pavilion, unveiled in his absence in 2003. Nor did he go to the opening of his last sizeable project finished while he was still alive, the ill-fated Niemeyer Cultural Centre in Spain, which closed nine months after it opened in 2011, before reopening the next year under new management.

Jair Valera, an assistant who had worked for Niemeyer since 1974, went to see Château La Coste on his behalf in 2010. He walked the site, chose a location and went back to Brazil. In conversation with Niemeyer, he came up with four or five proposals. McKillen selected the one that has finally been realised. It sits on land protected by the local authority as agricultural, and so it took a protracted period of persuasion to secure the necessary permissions before McKillen’s team built the structure standing here today.

The Château La Coste project is unlikely to be the end of it. In Brazil, the appetite for posthumous Niemeyer projects, large and small, is seemingly insatiable. The year after Niemeyer’s death, his office, which by then was being run by Valera, alongside Niemeyer’s granddaughter, the late Ana Elisa Niemeyer (also an architect), picked up several large new projects, including a research park in northern Brazil and an aquarium planned for a coastal suburb of Rio. Back in France, with the final touches applied as we write, Niemeyer's pavilion at Château La Coste opens to the public this month.

INFORMATION

chateau-la-coste.com

From the outside, the work of Ruy Ohtake epitomises all the unique qualities of modernist Brazilian architecture: the formal sculptural gesture, the open plan, the fluidity of form, the built-in concrete furniture and the simple rawness of approach. Qualities much admired but rarely produced with the same flair elsewhere.

Ohtake studied architecture in the late 1950s in São Paulo and started his own practice in the 1960s, when Brazilian modernism was at its apex. This was a rich cultural time in Brazil. Music, cinema and theatre were at their peak. ‘Who would not know bossa nova or teatro novo even today?’ Ohtake asks.

Ohtake rebelled against the pragmatic Paulista School of architecture in Sao Paulo and emphasised organic shapes in his work, using concrete sculpturally, an approach mostly seen among the architecture developed in Rio, and especially that by Oscar Niemeyer. Ohtake takes any comparison between his work and Niemeyer's as a great compliment. He explains: 'I see Niemeyer's work as the vertebral column of Brazilian architecture.'

Ruy Ohtake: Brazilian modernist master

His extensive body of work (more than 200 buildings) has made Ohtake famous in Brazil. The strongest are the residential projects completed early in his career and the residential tower blocks built in the 1980s. Our favourite, and the location for this photo shoot, is the Tomie Ohtake Residence, a definite modern classic of Brazilian architecture, built in 1968 for Ohtake's parents. Its value was recognised at the time, winning an architectural prize by the Brazilian Institute of Architects in 1971.

The design was progressive even then – a live/work space was not a typical request in the 1960s. The plan is extremely simple: a large rectangular space with an adjacent garden and swimming pool area. Years after its completion, an adjacent lot was added to the house as a service area. This addition is so well integrated into the early scheme that it is barely detectable. The main house, decades on, still feels contemporary with its appealing flowing concrete forms.

Although Brazilian born, Ohtake's Japanese ancestry adds a powerful simplicity to his work. Colour and texture are always present, a lesson he might have learnt from his mother, Tomie, a well-known abstract painter. The house is filled with her paintings and sculpture and much of the home's built-in furniture is a combined effort between architect and artist. One of Ohtake's signatures is the use of built-in furniture as spatial intervention. In the Tomie Ohtake Residence, many pieces work this way – such as the fluid concrete bench visually supporting the cantilevered concrete fireplace above it. Another element which is seen regularly in his projects is the use of very thin concrete partitions to divide the living spaces.

Ohtake sees furniture design as a complementary activity to his architecture. While it may take five years to complete a house, furniture pieces are usually designed and prototyped in 60 days. These are generally one-off pieces for the residential projects Ohtake works on and do not address mass production; a very architectural way of looking at furniture design. Ohtake is a believer in a unique Brazilian cultural identity although he has seen many changes since the 1960s.

'It is not about preservation, it is about evolution! Preservation is about stagnation,' he says. Ohtake's work has changed as a response to new materials and technology but his language has remained the same. We stand by his residential projects of the 1960s, which provide the perfect backdrop for a lesson in Brazilian design.

‘We wanted to create a retail experience which transported people forwards into time, where reality and science collide,’ says Sherry Huang, owner of experiential Shanghai-based luxury boutique ENG, which has opened its second outpost in Shanghai's TX Mall, a sprawling six-floor space that has the technologically savvy, experientially inclined Gen Z shopper in mind. ‘This gave birth to a strong sci-fi vision, referencing influences including Zaha Hadid for curves and shapes, Oscar Niemeyer for furniture installations, and also iconic science fiction classics like Gattaca, Minority Report and Westworld.’

‘We kept coming back to the “all-round” aspect of interiors in this sci-fi concept, a world where every surface in all dimensions is utilised in the absence of gravity drawing everything to the ground,’ adds Huang of ENG's second multi-brand concept store, a space that houses labels including Ottolinger, Martine Rose, Helmut Lang and Telfar. Its futuristic folds and metallic fixtures and fittings are interspersed with robotic arms, cyborg-like mannequins and geometric strips of lighting. Since ENG's inception in 2019, the boutique has focused on immersive retail, bridging cultural gaps between fashion, art and music, and stimulating the senses with holographic projections, vending machines and installations. It is also expanding the online domestic retail operations it runs through WeChat, and launching a global e-commerce platform.

Enter the futuristic world of ENG Shanghai

Shanghai’s TX Mall and its ENG outpost aim to bridge the gap between bricks-and-mortar and digital retail experiences. ‘Generally speaking, the young generation is more concerned with the cultural interpretation behind the clothes instead of the clothes themselves,’ Huang says, emphasising her decision to locate the new store within a leisure- and entertaintment-focused mall environment, and to dedicate 50 per cent of its floor space to ‘creative endeavours' that are not fashion focused. This is a consumer trend in luxury that we see not only in China but echoed around the world’s international markets, she adds.

One result of such a trend is ENG's collaboration with Valencia-born artist Carlos Saez, whose work has been exhibited at MoMA and The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), The National Portrait Gallery (London) and La Termica, Las Naves and Espai Tactel (Spain). The collaboration comprises a series of art pieces resembling robotic arachnids, which will be exhibited at the new ENG until September 2021. ‘Saez’s work uniquely explores the relationships between the human and technology. We were immediately drawn to the synergy between this and our own vision and philosophy around this topic, and the common ground in bringing to fore the aesthetic of machinery and mechanisation,’ Huang says. 

‘By building all-round fashion content in three-dimensions, the space encourages our customers to change their perspective and see things differently,' she adds. ‘This physically embodies what is at the heart of ENG.’

INFORMATION

523 Huaihai Zhong Lu 
near Yandang Lu
Huangpu District

Paulo Mendes da Rocha still channels the energy of a revolutionary. The 81-year-old architect's discourse, usually self-contradictory, is intense, much like the body of work that spans his 50-year career. Take his house in Butanta, for example, which he built in 1964. Even today, it's an architectural gesture against the culture of individualism. The banishing of circulation space, and the design of rooms with windows that open not externally but internally towards the common areas, represents a radical proposal of respectful co-existence.

Delicate paper models all around his office tell stories about his current projects; the Vitória Museum, already under construction; laboratories for Vale do Rio Doce in Belem do Pani; the Vigo University building in Spain; and the new Carriage Museum in Lisbon. The architect seems genuinely unconcerned about the current global economic difficulties. ‘How can Europe talk about crisis aft er having overcome two World Wars and having rebuilt entire countries from scratch? We should allow capitalism to be discussed as well as reinvented,' he says.

‘The best thing an architect can say is that he doesn’t know what architecture is’

Mendes de Rocha's long service as a lecturer at Sao Paulo University would have been longer had the military dictatorship not banned him from teaching for two decades. He suggests today's more benign political environment will allow Brazilian architects to again spark urban revitalisation, just as the country's modernists did.

‘I don't think there is a Brazilian architecture, there is just architecture in Brazil,' he says. He references Rio icons like the Museum of Modern Art by Affonso Eduardo Reidy and the Ministry of Education and Health, by a team that included Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa. ‘These are works of architecture that transform nature,' he says, and by "nature" he explains that he does not mean the simple natural landscape, but the whole socio-geographic phenomena .

Though he seems nonchalant about awards, Mendes da Rocha considers the Pritzker Prize he received in 2006 as recognition of how Brazil's attitude to architecture has had a positive influence internationally. But he suggests there are many challenges that Latin American architecture has yet to overcome.

‘Latin America is still being discovered, but the biggest danger for Brazil would be to stand out before its time. lt would just lead to ephemeral fireworks.' But isn't contemporary architecture also, in a way, ephemeral? ‘The best thing an architect can say is that he doesn't know what architecture is,' comes the reply.

The work of Brazilian artist Adriana Varejão is entrenched in hybridity, juxtaposition and uneasy contradiction. The discipline of painting is stretched to its extremes as she reifies the legacy of Brazil's colonial past, pluralist identities, disparate cultures, religion, eroticism, Modernism, cannibalism, and plenty in between. 

At Gagosian, New York, Varejão – who lives in an Oscar Niemeyer-designed house in Rio de Janeiro – is unveiling new works. In Ruína Brasilis (Brasilis Ruin), a towering column simulates tiled walls (specifically, Talavera tiles, more of which later), and flesh. Chaotic, pulsating and impulsive red viscera explodes with erotic charge from cold, linear structure, a reminder that the legacies in Varejão’s work once lived, and live on. The work’s surface nods to the national colours of Brazil; its rupturing innards suggest Baroque theatrics or political decay.

Elsewhere, signs of life arrive under a different guise as Varejão unveils the latest in her ‘tile’ paintings. The series began in the late 1980s and drew on the azulejos, glazed terra-cotta tiles of Arab origin, used widely in Portuguese art since the Middle Ages and transported to Brazil through colonisation. This time, Varejão delves into the culture of Talavera poblana, a Mexican and Spanish ceramic tradition that, like the azulejos, interweaves variegated historical and social interactions. 

The creative process for these works is largely dictated by chance. Varejão smothers a square canvas with a thick layer of plaster. As it dries, cracks shatter the surface. Deep in the resulting fissures lurks the violence that has shaped Latin America’s past, its histories obscured by multifaceted colonialism, and a profound beauty which, like the Talavera poblana, feels difficult to place.

Wallpaper*: Where are you as we speak? 

Adriana Varejão: I am in Costa Rica with my family, quarantining in advance of my New York exhibition ‘Talavera’ at  Gagosian [running until 26 June], after several years of planning and working. After some difficult months in Brazil, we are now in a kind of paradise, sitting in front of a volcano with a forest full of birds! Costa Rica is impressively preoccupied with ecology and sustainability, with a very structured approach. It is saddening to see how Brazil, with the same or even more potential, is being destroyed by the incumbent political regime that works against the country's health and best long-term interests.

W*: Your home in Rio de Janeiro was designed by Oscar Niemeyer. How did you find the space, and what is your relationship with modern architecture?

AV: Growing up in Brazil amongst some of the great modern architecture of the world makes one very aware. In addition to Niemeyer's public buildings, I know many of his houses and always hoped to experience living in one. We found our current home by word of mouth, in very bad condition but with beautiful bones and a spectacular location at the foot of an old quarry.

We then embarked on a four-year programme to restore and renew it with a contemporary Brazilian architect, Lia Siqueira, and landscape designer Isabel Duprat, who remained faithful to Niemeyer’s aesthetic and lifestyle principles while upgrading the house into a functional contemporary home for a growing family and friends. When we were almost finished, the property next door became available so we acquired it as well to create a larger private garden environment.

W*: What was the first piece of art you remember seeing, and how did it make you feel? 

AV: Brasilia was inaugurated in 1960, and I spent my childhood there. I had this sense of living in a total work of art, largely created by Oscar Niemeyer and the artist Athos Bulcão, working together on architecture and tile mural designs.

W*: Which artists, writers, thinkers or musicians have had the biggest impact on you?

AV: Most importantly, the miscegenated nature and culture of the Brazilian Baroque, both religious and secular; the Cuban writer Severo Sarduy and his books, Written on a Body and Barroco. With regard to music, there are too many influences to name here, but I guess in the beginning it was Milton Nascimento, and in general Brazilian choro and samba music, both complex popular musical forms that are still vibrant today.

W*: Your work has long explored the pluralism of Brazilian identity, themes of miscegenation, memory, and decolonial narratives. How has your approach to work, or priorities, evolved since the early days of your career?

AV: I am currently planning a major retrospective exhibition at Pinacoteca di São Paulo in Brazil in 2022, curated by the museum’s director Jochen Volz. Together we are revisiting my earliest paintings as a starting point. I realise just how much these oil paintings on canvas provided the basis for so much of the work that followed in different mediums and forms. All the themes that you mention and more have been present in my life and in my work from the outset, although at the time we did not have the precise language. Ideas for my art have always been in the territory of hybridity and I continue to pursue them in ever more diverse ways today.

W*: Many of your pieces have included painted forms that resemble raw meat, contained within tiled forms or flatter surfaces. What draws you to this motif?

AV: My so-called ‘ruinas de charques’ or ‘meat ruins’ serve as metaphors for uncompleted time. They indicate the fragility of tradition, the precariousness inherent in the concept of planning, and the instability of values in countries like Brazil where discontinuity is the rule. They represent the imminent time of the decomposition of the flesh. I also associate meat with eroticism, a material exacerbation: this chaotic, pulsating matter, the exposed, excessive, visceral meat provokes an erotic charge, bringing life to the tiled ruins. And, of course, given that this representation of flesh and blood is simulated in paint and canvas, I am invoking the corporeal drama of the theatrical Baroque.

In your  Gagosian exhibition, you’ll be presenting a new work inspired by the culture of the Portuguese azulejo, and the Mexican Talavera ceramic traditions. What sparked your interest in these and what was the process of creating the pieces?

In the late 1980s, I began researching azulejos, the glazed terracotta tiles of Arab origin that have been the most widely used form of decoration in Portugal, brought to Brazil through colonisation and trade. Over many years, through firsthand research, I have assembled a vast archive of references for them. I developed my special technique for the ‘tile’ paintings by covering a square canvas with a thick layer of plaster and allowing it to dry over time to produce a surface with deep fissures resembling crackled porcelain. 

My most recent tile paintings explore the culture of Talavera poblana, the Mexican ceramic tradition originating from the Spanish city of Talavera de la Reina. Like the azulejo, it draws on equally diverse sources. When I was travelling in Mexico in the mid-1990s, I photographed a wall of Talavera tiles. This formed the basis for the painting on canvas Parede Mexicana (1999). Twenty years later, this painting became an indexical reference for an entirely new body of work where I adapted and enlarged key motifs from individual tiles to the scale of 70 x 70 inch (180 x 180cm) square canvases.

In this transfigurative process, the motifs shift into a broader signifying register of artistic and cultural references. I love these unexpected artistic crossroads; by interweaving time, culture, and place, I seek to establish dialogues between aesthetic systems once segregated by dominant narratives, and in so doing question entrenched assumptions about the life of forms in art.

W*: What is the most challenging project you've worked on to date?

AV: My eponymous pavilion at Inhotim in Brumadinho. From the outset of the commission, I worked with the architect Rodrigo Cerviño Lopez to create a project where the architecture was a complete piece of art with the artworks it was designed to house, from the ground up – from the galleries to the roof terrace and its benches tiled with my own designs, to the outdoor water element that penetrates the building itself.

W*: What’s the most interesting thing you’ve read, watched or listened to within the last month?

AV: The ideas of the radical Spanish philosopher Paul Preciado, who is so widely read now in Latin America. He is writing an essay for my new monograph that  Gagosian will publish with Rizzoli in 2022!

In our ongoing At Home With profile series

INFORMATION
Adriana Varejão, ‘Talavera’, until 26 June 2021, Gagosian, New York
gagosian.com

ADDRESS

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New York, NY 10011

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Those, like us, who have a soft spot for crude concrete architecture, will love the work of Juliaan Lampens (1926-2019). The powerful concrete roughness of the Belgian architect's volumes is inescapable when you walk past two of his best known buildings, both near Ghent: the Chapel of Our Blessed Lady of Kerselare, in the village of Edelare, and the Van Wassenhove house in Sint-Martens-Latem.

However, digging a little deeper into Lampens' life and work, it quickly becomes apparent that there is more to his architecture than brutalism by numbers. Belgian curator Angelique Campens has been studying Lampens' work since her university years and knew him well. The architect had a reputation for being reserved, keeping his business to himself to the point of avoiding contact with colleagues. He didn’t even travel much, reveals Campens. ‘But he had a lot of books. He admired Oscar Niemeyer and was influenced by Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe.' He may seem to have lacked the desire for architectural pilgrimage, but Lampens practised non-stop from his base in Eke, East Flanders, from 1950 until his last work was built in 2002 – creating a legacy of about 50, mostly residential, projects, including the chapel and Eke library.

Lampens was born in 1926 in De Pinte and grew up in nearby Eke, the son of a cabinetmaker. After working as a technical draughtsman, he studied architecture in Ghent and set up his own firm straight after graduation, kick-starting it with commissions from his father's middle-class clientele. While following a more conventional design style at first, he nurtured an interest in modernism. 'His visit to the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels was a turning point for him,' Campens explains. 'Shortly after that, his designs changed drastically. He thought that Le Corbusier was too sculptural, and Mies too structured, but he wanted to combine the two.'

Lampens' first modern design was his own house and office in Eke, built in 1960. The house, a simple low box with a strong horizontal concrete slab roof and wooden details, was a taste of things to come. Testing the idea of lightness, the architect created the structure with almost no load-bearing walls, based on a steel-column grid. Glass-enclosed apart from a brick wall concealing it from the street, the house connects visually with the outdoors at the back and is largely open-plan inside, with bare brick and concrete on show. For the region at the time, Lampens' approach was radical. Privacy from the street, a connection with the natural environment, the use of exposed raw materials and an open-plan interior all became recurring themes in his work. Lampens also paid special attention to smaller concete architecture details, such as the roof's drains, which he described as 'functional ornaments'.

The commission for the Chapel of Our Blessed Lady of Kerselare followed soon after the completion of Lampens' house. However, the design with which he won the 1961 competition – with Professor Rutger Langaskens, one of his former teachers – was very different from what you see today. Upon winning, Lampens reworked the building, making it so altered from the original and so alien to the neighbourhood that during the concrete casting, passers-by thought it would be a silo. Despite this, and with the incumbent pastor's support, the high-ceilinged chapel – resembling a giant concrete skip – opened in 1966. It featured bespoke concrete benches (currently removed), a large glass wall and a central concrete skylight, while the protruding mono-pitched roof provided outdoor shelter for the congregation.

It was the chapel's large untreated surfaces that led many to label Lampens a follower of brutalist architecture, a tag he has never accepted. 'He never felt part of a group,' Campens stresses. The chapel and his Eke house were landmarks in Lampens' career. Part of his aloof, albeit good-natured, character is reflected in the esoteric, yet sturdy and unexpectedly open designs; street-shy, they are welcoming once you're inside. Certainly, they gained him many new commissions.

Among these was the Van Wassenhove residence, completed in 1974. School teacher Albert Van Wassenhove, admiring the Kerselare chapel, asked Lampens for a similar house. In response, and taking into account the plot's limited views, the architect created an irregular rough-cast concrete volume, blind from two sides and semi-sunken into a hill. For the flowing interior, as with other projects, Lampens designed furniture – chairs, tables and chaises longues – all simple and mainly wooden.

Lampens' most daring work is the Vandenhaure-Kiebooms house in Huise, completed in 1967. The client, Gerard Vandenhaute, hoped for a house that pushed the envelope. His wish was granted. Designed along Lampens' usual lines – a minimal, one-level glass box topped off with a thick concrete flat roof – the house is pillar- and wall-less inside; even the bathroom is open to the rest of the interior, with privacy afforded only by a shoulder-height cylindrical concrete partition. In a play of transparency and openness, the only other fixed component is the kitchen. The roof stands on a solid, street-facing concrete wall and two steel pillars on the opposite side.

Sketching everything from tiny details to larger concepts, Lampens produced hundreds of drawings throughout his career, signing every one. Still, he never cherished paper architecture. 'He called it “embryonic” architecture. For him, drawings were secondary. Built work remained the important thing,' Campens says. Today, these drawings are held at Eke library, where the Juliaan Lampens Foundation takes care of his archive, run by, among others, his son Dieter Lampens and Campens.

Lampens' experimental, concrete architecture work remains largely unexplored. A group exhibition in Brazil he participated in years ago is probably its only appearance outside Belgium. But there remains a devoted local following for his idiosyncratic designs. Tellingly, owners of Lampens’ houses are known to have lived in them for a long time. Campens’ monograph about the architect was published in 2010, and in 2012, the Van Wassenhove house was bequeathed to the University of Ghent. Now on long-term loan to the museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Deurle, it gained monument status in Belgium in 2017. 

A version of this article was first published in the April 2010 Issue of Wallpaper* (W* 133)

Brazil's famous capital, Brasilia, a city created from scratch using copious amounts of Modernist architecture, has been photographed by many. The new city was inaugurated on the 21 April 1960 and, including works by some of the country's biggest names in the field, has been studied, visited and loved by architecture enthusiasts and critics alike ever since. So what prompted artist and photographer Vincent Fournier to create his own series there? ‘[It was the challenge of brining] my own vision, my style, to this city that has been so photographed!' he explains and his passion resulted in a beautiful architecture book. 

In 2012, Fournier embarked on a project to travel to Brasilia and capture its essence, expressed through his own experiences and aesthetic. The series was all wrapped up by 2017, produced during two trips there. So captivating was the result that the MET (the Metropolitan Museum in New York) acquired five of his large formats photographs in 2016. ‘It was a request from Beatrice Galilee, Associate Curator of Architecture and Design in the department of Modern and Contemporary Art,' he recalls. ‘The images are now part of the permanent collection.'

Wondering around Brasilia's generous avenues and well known attractions helped him determine his angles and shots. Setting up each one was fairly easy, he says – the main challenge was ‘getting the authorizations for the access to the different buildings and make pictures.' 

The series includes many of the city's beloved landmarks and several Niemeyer classics, such as the National Museum, the Chamber of Deputies in the dome above the Assembly Room, and the Itamaraty Palace (the home of the Foreign Relations Ministry). Fournier's gaze illuminates them in a unique way, as part of his wider, recurrent themes and fascinations surrounding mythologies of the future, such as space exploration, utopian architecture, artificial intelligence and living technology. Similar topics were investigated during his series titled Space Project, which he launched in 2010. 

‘My interest in the city of Brasilia comes from a mixture of fascination and nostalgia for the stories and representations of the Future,' explains the photographer. ‘Indeed the Brazilian capital designed by Oscar Niemeyer and built in four years in the middle of a desert, embodies the vision of the future in the 60s.'

INFORMATION

Brasilia, Noeve, €44.90

vincentfournier.co.uk

Unlike almost every other of the 600-plus buildings modernist architect Oscar Niemeyer built during the course of his prodigiously long career, the home the architect designed for himself in Brasilia looks to the past rather than the future.  Situated in an upmarket residential zone a 20 minute drive from the city centre, Casa Niemeyer, as it is now officially known, is a long, low rectangular structure surrounded by villas and half-hidden gated developments. With its clay-tiled roof and veranda running along one side, it looks like nothing so much as a typical Brazilian farmhouse.

Between 1962 and 1964 the architect lived here, the last part of an inimitable eight-years that saw him play a pivotal role in making Brazil’s new capital rise up from nothing out of the surrounding savannah.

In 2017 I was invited to Brasilia to stage an exhibition of my work on Niemeyer’s little known Algerian period. The venue was his former home, with the exhibition marking its inauguration as a cultural space after it had been shuttered for twenty years. I arrived two days before the private view to find the spare, functionalist living room being wired up and whitewashed. Outside workmen were busy cleaning up the grounds. Still, the rest of the premises appeared more or less untouched. It seemed this might be the last chance to capture the place before the final traces of its past were erased.

I was particularly interested in how Niemeyer himself might have occupied the house. As I wandered around I started to ask myself what sort of imprint this legend of modernism might have left behind; in the built-in cupboards that lined the corridors and bedrooms; in the collection of his favourite Thonet chairs; in the asymmetric swimming pool that snakes through the garden like a broken-off fragment of his nearby futuristic city; even in the salmon-pink bath. 

On returning to London I came across an article describing how a few months prior to my exhibition in Brasilia the then President of Brazil Michel Temer had moved out of the Niemeyer designed Palácio da Alvorada, the head of state’s official residence. Apparently he no longer wanted to live there because he believed the Alvorada was haunted. I began thinking about ghosts, and in particular the ghosts – however improbable – of modernism. I wondered if they too might have been lurking somewhere in Casa Niemeyer. And whether the photographs I’d taken there might provide some sort of clue as to their existence.  

So instead of presenting them as a straightforward document I started considering these images – which are now part of the series IMAGEM SECUNDÁRIA / GHOST HOUSE – almost as archaeological relics. Ones which if turned around and viewed in a certain way might give up their secrets. By transforming modernism’s timeworn concrete trope into something more diaphanous, might it be possible to see past the apparent world to the ghosts of recent history? Not to then flee from them as Temer did, but rather to acknowledge them, and attempt to understand whatever it was – warning, admonition or promise – they might be trying to impart.

INFORMATION
jasonoddy.com

Few places in the world offer such an expansive, extraordinary composition of Modernist architecture as the Brazilian capital. Part of a handful of Modernist clusters around the world – such as, for example, Le Corbusier's Chandigarh in India – Brasilia combines the gravitas, drama and scale of the International Style with the glamour and power of a country's beating heart, conceived right from the start as the embodiment of modern Brazil. 

This year, Brasilia, which was created from scratch, celebrates its 60th anniversary, having been inaugurated on the 21 April 1960, following nearly four years of construction in the heart of the South American country. Featuring a grand urban plan by Lúcio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer as its iconic principle architect and Roberto Burle Marx as the landscape designer, the majestic city also includes works by lesser known internationally – yet no less important – modernists, such as João Filgueiras Lima (Lelé) and Ícaro Castro Mello. 

Today, the city remains the country's administrative centre, composed around a monumental axis, in a monumental civic scale. The National Congress and the Supreme Federal Court are there, as well as the official residence of the President of Brazil.  

Now, Brasilia is a listed UNESCO World Heritage Site and photographer Paul Clemence created and shared with us a series capturing the beauty of Brasilia's timeless classics, such as the National Congress (1958), the Palace of Justice (1962) and the Metropolitan Cathedral (1959) – all sleek lines, sweeping curves and clean contrasts, against the blue, sunny South American skies.

One afternoon in the British Library, Jason Oddy, photographer, artist and writer, stumbled across some Oscar Niemeyer buildings he was unfamiliar with. The sweeping curves, the volume and the story telling felt familiar, but the location – in Algeria – did not. After further research he discovered that the buildings, two universities and an Olympic-sized sports hall, were largely undocumented.

‘When Niemeyer left Brazil in 1966, after the 1964 military coup, he ended up in Paris, and then in 1968 he travelled to Algiers for the first time. He was there for six years. It’s a long time for an incredibly famous architect to be somewhere, but not that many people are aware of it,’ he tells Wallpaper*.

It was in June 1968, that Houari Boumédiène, chairman of Algeria’s Council of Revolution, socialist and hero of the recent War of Independence against France, invited Niemeyer, starchitect of Brasilia (and communist), to ‘project a new vision of Algeria to the outside world, and promote a new generation of engineers and academics.’

Niemeyer got started, designing the University of Constantine, with a sweeping concrete rendition of an open book supported by pilotis for the auditorium, completed in 1975. Then came the University of Science and Technology Houari Boumédiène and the Salle Omnisports known as ‘La Coupole’ for the 1975 Meditteranean Games in Algier’s Olympic Park. Each piece of architecture with their colossal open spaces and grand concrete gestures were designed to reflect Boumedienne’s socialist and militarist principles, and represent an ‘upending of the age-old order’.

‘He was commissioned to design a whole new downtown Algiers, in the manner of Brasilia, to create a huge municipal area with a new city for residential housing for Algerians, instead of the French. He also designed, in a moment of inspiration, a new mosque, that would float off shore into the Mediterranean.’

It was an exchange between architect and commissioner that summarized the politics of this place for Oddy: ‘Your mosque is beautiful, but it is quite revolutionary,’ said Boumédiène of the design. To which Niemeyer replied, ‘It is revolutionary, but the revolution cannot be stopped halfway.’

In his essay Oddy ponders on what ‘revolution’ meant to these two revolutionaries in this exchange, and whether they were talking about architecture or politics – it is possible that neither were on the same page of this open book. Nevertheless, when Boumédiène died in 1978, all of the projects got cancelled. Hence the title of Oddy’s book: The revolution will be stopped halfway.

After spending a week in Algiers in 2010, Oddy left the country with a better understanding of why the architecture had gone so undocumented. During his visit he came up against many bureaucratic barriers to photographing the government-owned buildings, and learnt more about the political history of the country, and its approach to tourism today. Unperturbed – Oddy has documented ‘the politics of place’ in some of the world’s most restricted spaces including the Pentagon, Guantanamo and a Nazi holiday resort – he spent three years pursuing permits to photograph the buildings.

On his return to Algiers, Oddy spent three weeks at the three venues, carefully documenting everything. His photographic technique, using a 5x4 inch plate camera, requires time and consideration that has become central to his style: ‘Unwieldy and slow-moving it obliges me to explore places in a measured, almost meditative way.’ And his results are therefore ‘traces of a deliberate engagement with space’.

Oddy describes how while seeing and spending time with the architecture was extraordinary, it was also complicated. ‘These buildings are modernist treasures. Some Algerians are very proud of them, but at the same time their upkeep is not a priority,’ he says.

Algeria has had other priorities – which Samia Henni, Algerian architectural historian, outlines in her introduction ‘When Militarism meets Modernism’. After the fight for independence between 1954 – 62, during which one in 10 Algerians died, the post-colonial period was marked by revolutionary excitement, yet stagnation and corruption followed. Civil War broke out in the early 1990s between Islamists who won an election, and the military, the original vanguard of the revolution.

While designed optimistically for a democratic state, Niemeyer’s buildings also became national scars of the military rule. Archival materials documented at the end of the book document the extent of the schemes on a Brasilia-style scale that could have been – many published here for the first time. ‘It was a unique moment. A project like that could have only happened under certain circumstances and with a revolutionist vein. It had everything in it,’ says Oddy. But, unfortunately for architectural history and Niemeyer fans, the revolution was stopped half way.

The politics of a photograph

Oddy describes the political complexity behind one of his photographs taken at the University of Science and Technology Houari Boumediene:

‘I constructed this image out of a number of images. While I was walking around the campus, which is located just outside Algiers in a suburb called Bab Ezzouar, I found a whole new section that included 24 lecture halls in the shape of bunkers. At that moment, I had a sense I was stumbling across a modern ruin. There was a lot of knee-high grass growing and the concrete bunkers were emerging from the earth like sarcophagi. The whole place is very sculptural, and each of the 24 lecture halls is identified by a letter of the alphabet.

‘Why are these bunkers in a university in Algiers, designed after it had gone through a revolution and had an ‘Arabisation’ of culture, still using the Roman alphabet, the language of the colonizer? After the 150-year French rule, there was an anti-French campaign in the 60s led by one of the revolutionary figures, and then there was a further campaign in the mid-70s to Arabise the military.

‘I photographed each one of these doorways to the lecture halls, and the letters A to Z in them and I laid them out like a French keyboard. I wanted to ask the question about the status of language in the educational system, the meaning of being educated in the language of the colonizer, and how this impacts the outcomes of education on the people of Algeria.

‘Soon I began to understand that French is very much seen as the language of the upper classes, linked to privilege, and then corruption and the military state that took control of oil and gas money. The story is incredibly complex, and as an outsider it’s hard to make a rounded comment, but this is my take.’

INFORMATION

The Revolution Will Be Stopped Halfway: Oscar Niemeyer in Algeria by Jason Oddy
Columbia Books on Architecture and the City

arch.columbia.edu/books

Pitting technology against itself is a gladiatorial form of entertainment, but it’s also a source of innovation and new ideas. Roborace is a forthcoming racing series designed to showcase new developments in both electric vehicle design and autonomous driving. Working in parallel with the all-electric FIA Formula E series, Roborace will deliver a dose of sci-fi design and cinematic speeds to street racing. The first dedicated Roborace car was created by Daniel Simon, a vehicle designer best known for his work in films like Tron: Legacy and Oblivion. The Syd Mead of the modern era, Simon’s Robocar is a striking, stripped back piece of elemental design, shorn of the need for a human-machine interface.

These exclusive images showcase the Robocar in an all-new livery, designed in collaboration with the photographer Benedict Redgrove. Set against the stark Modernist backdrop of Oscar Niemeyer’s Cultural Centre in Avilés, Spain, the Robocar is presented as an object from the near future.

We spoke to Daniel Simon about the collaboration...

Wallpaper*: How did you come to this project?
Daniel Simon: I was one of the first hires of Roborace in early 2016, tasked with leading the design and styling of an autonomous racing car, as newly appointed Chief Design Officer of the company. That vehicle, Robocar, was to be developed entirely from scratch to demo run worthiness, within months. It was an offer impossible to ignore.

W*: What have been the biggest challenges?
DS: Robocar's job is to embody the spirit of Roborace, a bold, disruptive concept for sport and entertainment. Our halo-car had to look even to the untrained eye like the most normal thing in the world – an autonomous racing car. We could not look around us to see what others are doing; we are the ones breaking new ground. Making such a complex machine operate while maintaining the clean and iconic look we designed has be the top challenge. Autonomous cars need a large array of small and large sensors. Blending them seamlessly into a fluid car skin meant adjustments to the very last day.

W*: What are the greatest opportunities of working with Roborace?
DS: If you have a career, it is easy to fall into a pattern of doing the same things over and over. That is what made you successful in the first place. But comfort kicks in, and creativity dies. I enjoy working with daring entrepreneurs, walking unchartered territory, finding answers by trying and failing and trying again. I may not always agree with all the ideas, but I feel alive. Roborace is the epitome of that.

W*: Is there any tech or forms here that could be transferred to conventional sports cars?
DS: Artificial intelligence and how we humans will interact with it can no longer be ignored by motorsport. Roborace steps into that exciting vacuum. It is a global event format to bring AI and human competition together – under extreme and entertaining circumstances. Motorsport has always influenced commercial road cars – Roborace brings that concept to the 21st century.

W*: What do you think of Benedict’s imagery?
DS: I knew of Benedict's stunning work before I knew who took the pictures. Those are wonderful circumstances to meet someone. We share similar values, especially ‘less is more' and the power of composition, which both applies to photography and design. We became good friends.

Here, we also discuss the project with photographer Benedict Redgrove...

Wallpaper*: How did you come to know about this project?
Benedict Redgrove: Nicola Peters and the late Justin Cooke at Roborace invited me to come meet with them with Denis Sverdlov, Roborace’s CEO. We went through all their plans and talked about how this project was the start of autonomous racing. Over the following months we planned a series of ideas to showcase the car. I was given free reign to create a set of images that I loved and would be exhibited to promote Roborace.

W*: Talk us through the process of the shoot? How much post-production was involved?
BR: Initially I had really wanted to shoot this in Brasilia. The idea of the Roborace car racing through Oscar Niemeyer’s futuristic city was hugely appealing, but the practicality of getting it over there was just not realistic. However, I also knew of this Niemeyer location in Spain and thought it would be perfect. It has a lot of what I wanted in it and had the essence of the sci-fi style feel I wanted. The car was moved around the location by hand. It had no power, so we were rolling to from zone to zone to get it into the right position.

The location is surrounded on one side by a mountain range and the other is a port and town. We worked on a colour palette and set to work on removing any distractions from the background. The white render finish of the architecture was made pristine in post-production. Nothing was built, it was more a case of simplification, cleaning surfaces and keeping to the original idea. The car had small amounts of retouching to allow for the handmade aspects of the body panels to fit more closely. The images work really well when they are enlarged, there is so much detail in them that gets a little lost in smaller versions.

W*: Both your imagery and Daniel’s design represent a hitherto unseen future. Do you have any feelings about retro-futurism, or nostalgia for past futures, and how might they have influenced your work here?
BR: My work is heavily influenced by my love of space, sci-fi, cinema and the previous era’s dreams of the future. The past’s idea of a brave new world and where we were going seemed more dreamlike; now it is much more of a harsh reality. Daniel’s futuristic work is something I have admired for years, and to get the opportunity to work with him directly was a bit of dream for me. You can’t help but be influenced by your past loves, but I always have an eye to a real future; that’s what I tried to capture here. Oscar Niemeyer’s designs still look like the future today, so it seems to have been the perfect mix.
 
W*: This is a very cinematic approach to filmmaking. Did you ever envisage this as a film?
BR: I would have loved to have made this into a short film, and Brasilia would have been the most amazing location for it. I created the photographs to have a very cinematic look and so I feel in this case they work as “stills from a scene” and your mind can do the rest in making up the full story.

W*: Tell me a bit about how the livery came about? How were the colours chosen? 
BR: Daniel and I had been liaising about various colour schemes for the car, and he was very open in asking ‘what do you want to create – this is your car’. He really let me be the guide on this. We worked up quite a few and it feels quite special when you’re working with someone of Daniel’s ability to be asked asked what you’d like and then have it created in 3D. I love the final choice, and feel it has just the right balance of futurism and tech, along with a very tiny nod to sci-fi of the past. 

INFORMATION

For more information, visit Daniel Simon’s website, Benedict Redgrove’s website, and Roborace website

As unlikely as it sounds, Brazilian architect Fernanda Marques has installed a swimming pool in the courtyard of a duplex apartment in São Paulo’s upscale residential neighbourhood of Villa Nova Conceição. The pool may be just one element of her design for the 477 sq m ground and lower ground floor flat in a 1990s block; but it’s a crucial one.

The 10m-long pool takes up 25 sq m of the outside area and is accessed via the stairway in the exterior garden or from the gym on the upper floor. All that water is kept at bay by an 8cm-thick sandwich of glass panels bonded by a high technology structural membrane.

The pool overlooks the living room, which houses some of the owners’ mostly Brazilian art collection. Pieces by Ernesto Neto, Edgard de Souza, Manoel Rio Branco, Zerbini and Tunga are complemented by Marques’ choice of furniture, much of by Brazil’s late, great modernist heroes. The dining table and chairs are by Joaquim Tenreiro; a pair of Jangada armchairs by Jean Gillon – who was originally from Romania – stand near the artworks on the ground floor; and there’s an armchair in the master bedroom by Zanine de Caldas, who had worked with Oscar Niemeyer. Meanwhile the wooden bench on the terrace is by Hugo França, who is still living. Marques’ aim was to keep the interiors relatively simple, to leave room for the collection to be added to.

Despite the artworks, it is the aquamarine water that draws the eye. Marques, whose mostly female team is headquartered in São Paulo, has a track record in magicking luxuriant interiors for residences in her home country, Miami and increasingly Lisbon. She says of the pool: ‘It was intended to be more than a leisure experience, but a poetic presence inside an art collector’s home.’

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Fernanda Marques Arquitetos Associados

 website

Closed for over a decade, Oscar Niemeyer’s 1972 Hotel Nacional in Rio de Janeiro has reopened as the 400-room Gran Meliá Nacional.

The restoration of the imposing tubular building in the city’s São Conrado quarter has preserved key elements of the original design – including the lobby, staircases, sinuous ramps and Carybé’s 45m-long concrete installation, as well as Roberto Burle Marx’s landscaping – while adding the requisite bells and whistles of a millennial hotel such as Trussardi bedding.

Interior designer Debora Aguiar’s mood-board takes its cues from the imposing Pedro Corrêa de Araújo chandelier in the lobby, though for sheer spectacle it’s all about the wraparound view of Rio, São Conrado bay, Ipanema and Copacabana from the hotel’s 34th floor helipad.

There are enough diversions here to keep guests hedonistically house-bound: the Clarins spa takes up an entire floor, while the pool concierge conducts tipsy caipirinha workshops.

INFORMATION

Website

ADDRESS

Av Niemeyer 769
São Conrado
Rio de Janeiro

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A leaf through Assouline’s celebration of H Stern makes you realise that it has been a long time coming. We all know the latter as the world’s most recognised Brazilian jewellery name, established by a canny German, Hans Stern, in 1945. He saw the rich international potential in South America’s local, semi-precious gem trade. Yet his approach was different.

Unlike many jewellery houses, H Stern has primarily viewed the exquisite natural resources of its South American home – gold, semi-precious stones – as a creative tool, acting as if sculptor-jewellers. To that end, a thread of suitably starry design collaborations is laced through the fabric of its 70-year history. Oscar Niemeyer, the Campana Brothers, Tim Burton, Roberto Burle Marx and Diane von Furstenberg are just some of the creatives with H Stern jewellery collections to their names. Today, that vision is further boosted by artistic director Roberto Stern’s canny creative instincts, as this timely book attests.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the H Stern website

Photography: Michael Ainscough

'Last year it was all about the space, but this week it is much more about pieces,' says the Milanese design doyen Nina Yashar.

The inimitable art dealer opened her sprawling 1,500 sq m design 'warehouse', Nilufar Depot, during last year's Salone del Mobile and is again likely to steal the show with a stunning hybrid of antique, vintage and contemporary works which Yashar meticulously arranges in 'cinematic scenes'. Think retro-futuristic 'Chaise Maurice' armchairs by the Beirut-based david/nicolas design studio paired with the perfectly proportioned, limited edition brass and marble 'Blossom' floor lamp by Analogia Project, atop a vintage rug.

The words 'treasure trove' are often bandied about but the Depot offers a true master class in design. Much on show this week has been specially commissioned, from a trio of Massimiliano Locatelli's fluid 'Urmia' tables and abstract benches by Martino Gamper, to Italian architect Roberto Baciocchi's extraordinary 'Mirror Room', featuring Milanese artist Roberto Giulio Rida's extravagant indigo blue 'Mediterraneo' cabinets. It's not all Italian: we also spotted ethereal pendant lights by American designer Lindsey Adelman, Belgian designer Maarten De Ceulaer's elegant pile of leather briefcases, and the British creative Laura Bethan Wood's 'Ring' chandelier.

The highlight, however, is the intriguing collection of custom furniture and lighting by the young up-and-coming Italian designer Federico Peri, whose integrated 'Biblioteca Itinerante' seat with built-in shelves introduces a fresh take on industrial form. 

'I am obsessed by his idea of building a house with all the same design pieces like Jean Prouvé. The unity of it is very beautiful,' says Yashar.

The gallerist admits she is equally obsessed with Loctatelli's new 3D printed table, created using a machine designed by a NASA engineer to build houses on the moon. 

'This is what Salone should be. Not things you've already seen or that remind you of something from last year. It is about surprising people,' she says. Mission accomplished.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit Nilufar’s website

ADDRESS

Nilufar Depot
Viale V. Lancetti 34
20158 Milan

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Italian photographer Luisa Lambri has built her reputation shooting modernist architecture, particularly houses. And the very best, at that. She has photographed homes designed by Lautner, Neutra, Barragan, Le Corbusier, Niemeyer, Breuer and on. But rather than catching sweeping forms, meticulous mass, Lambri goes in close, onto windows and shutters, framing skylights, moving in on surfaces. These are not so much abstractions, but – and Lambri has been deeply influenced by the domestic portraits and self-portraits of the late Francesca Woodman – intimacies. Or, in the play of light, in the turn of a corner, a search for intimacy.

In her new show at London’s Thomas Dane gallery, Lambri gets intimate with post-war modernist sculpture, specifically pieces by Donald Judd, the Brazilian Neo-Concrete artist Lygia Clark, German minimalist Charlotte Poseneske and Barbara Hepworth (the show takes that particular route, mapped out by architects OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen, who created the internal architecture for the show).

Lambri’s camera pokes inside Judd’s aluminium boxes, confusing scale and creating rooms of confusing perspective (and revealing Judd’s famously low tolerances); closes in on the hinges and joints of Glark’s moveable aluminium bichos; frames Hepworth’s own framing of a lushly tropical garden in St Ives, creating a portal into a fantastic other world; and, most successfully perhaps, creates abstract blocks of colour in Poseneske’s aluminium sheets.

In the gallery’s other space, a few doors up, the LA-based curator Douglas Fogle has put together a companion piece for Lambri’s show. Taking off from Kasimir Malevich’s idea of the architecktons (quasi-architectural maquettes without windows) Blind Architecture includes the work of 20 artists that come at architecture from strange angles.

The show jumps from remarkable photographs of sculptural maquettes produced by the Soviet VKhUTEMAS Workshops in the 1920s; Man Ray’s Dust Breeding, a shot of a Duchamp’s The Large Glass turned into an odd, alien landscape by gathered dust and detritus; and on through a Martin Kippenberger collection of snapshots, tagged Pyschobuildings; Carl Andre’s typewritten concrete poetry; Imi Knoebel’s pioneering projections onto the facades of buildings; and Sol LeWitt’s biographical cut-outs of aerial shots of Manhattan and Chicago. As well as, inevitably, the Becher’s blind industrial buildings and infrastructure, which seem to dominate the space as the always do.

Also included is a wonderful Catherine Opie miniature of LA freeways; Jean-Luc Mouléne’s Monopole, a five-starred onyx sculpture based on wave breakers, a form, as Fogle explains, based on complex modelling of an ‘anti-wave’; and quasi-maquettes, in painted bronze by Ricky Swallow, and ceramics by Ron Nagle. It’s a show of odd resonances, creating a strange sort of cityscape.

INFORMATION

’Luisa Lambri with OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen’ and ’Blind Architecture’ are on view till 9 January, 2016. For more information, visit the Thomas Dane Gallery website

ADDRESS

3 & 11 Duke Street St James's
London SW1Y 6BN
UK

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Coming on the heels of its ‘Lina Bo Bardi + Roberto Burle Marx’ exhibition earlier this year, New York design gallery R & Company has opened an impressive new show, ‘Brazil Modern’ that includes those two earlier subjects — Bo Bardi and Burle Marx — along with a long roster of other Brazilian greats: Oscar Niemeyer, Sergio Rodrigues, Joaquim Tenreiro, and Martin Eisler.

The exhibition, curated by R & Company principal Zesty Meyers, presents furniture, textiles, and archival material ranging from the 1940s to 2012. ‘I could have done an exhibition with five objects—and that could have been great — but I wanted to capture the energy of Brazil,’ Meyers says, underscoring the show’s diversity. Walls painted in different shades of blue reference Brazil’s trademark sky and water.

Though the gallery has remarkable holdings in the cannon of modern design — including Joe Colombo, Wendell Castle, and Greta Magnusson-Grossman — it has distinguished itself over the years by bringing lesser-known designers not only into the market, but also, through its commitment to research, into greater public awareness. ‘Brazil Modern’ is one of the by-products of that enterprising and research-intensive approach. Many of the works have never before been publicly exhibited, and many were acquired in a fine tooth-comb way by the gallery principals travelling to Brazil over many years. 

Owing to the country’s recent political history as a military dictatorship, most design work had to stay within the country, leaving behind a vast trove of mid-century artefacts largely unknown outside Brazil. ‘Most people still don’t have export licenses,’ says Meyers. 

The exhibition anticipates the publication of a new book, Brazil Modern, authored by Aric Chen (with an introduction by Meyers), due out in March 2016 from Monacelli Press. Many of the objects included in the gallery show will be more fully analysed in the book. For Meyers, the history of 20th century design is still in draft phase. ‘Brazil is the last great discovery of mid-century design.’

INFORMATION

Website

’Brazil Modern’ is on view until 7 January 2016. For more information, visit R & Company’s website

ADDRESS

82 Franklin Street
New York

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Brazilian furniture company Etel is launching a new series of reissues, taking on the work of Italian-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi. A collection of four pieces was presented this week, part of a larger range of 12 re-editions, which the company will release over the next year.

‘Etel's philosophy is to retell and preserve the history of Brazilian design, and to value the artistic legacy of these great designers,’ explains Lissa Carmona, daughter of founder Etel Carmona and now at the helm of the family-run company. They produce furniture by living Brazilian architects and designers, alongside reissues by the likes of Oscar Niemeyer and Sérgio Rodrigues.

Carmona’s passion for Bo Bardi brought her to explore her furniture work, which until now, was never produced on a large scale. Working closely with the Instituto Lina Bo and P. M. Bardi, the Carmona family selected 12 pieces from the architect’s furniture repertoire. Throughout her career as an architect, Bo Bardi expanded her reach, working on landscape design, urbanism, graphic design and illustration, as well as designed the furniture for her buildings (such as the iconic MASP in Sao Paulo). Her furniture successfully merged a modernist, innovative aesthetic with traditional Brazilian concepts.

Mainly seating, the pieces were designed as part of her partnership with Giancarlo Palanti under the Palma Art Studio, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Bo Bardi adapted her design to the manufacturing possibilities of the Brazilian industry at the time, using steel tubes, wood leather and indigenous textiles. Some of the pieces, such as the Brass Balls chair, were designed for Bo Bardi’s own residence in Sao Paulo, a glass house in the middle of a tropical garden where Etel chose to present the collection to the Brazilian public. Other designs never reached the prototype stage, let alone go into production. These have been manufactured by the company following Bo Bardi’s sketches.

Carmona notes how freedom was always at the core of Bo Bardi’s work, and the aspect of her production that mainly attracts her and interests her. ‘Lina's work is of very high importance,' she adds, 'because as a multifaceted artist she has left an unquestionable legacy to Brazil and therefore deserves a place of prominence in the ETEL Collection.’ 

H Stern turns 70 next year and to celebrate, the Brazilian jeweller has chosen to host a glittering gold exhibition at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (CCBB) in its native Rio de Janeiro. Ouru - Portugese for 'gold' - explores the connection between the precious metal and the arts in the form of 30 unique works by Brazilian artists, including sculptors, painters, photographers and conceptual artists.

Eleven rooms are linked via 330m gold thread, representing H Stern's 'Fluid Gold' necklace design. Several of the exhibiting artists have collaborated on collections with the jeweller, including Oscar Niemeyer who joined famously joined forces with the brand in 2011 for a collection of architecture-inspired white and yellow gold pieces. One whole room is dedicated to these diamond-studded, contoured earrings, rings and bracelets, which mimic the organic, curving lines of Niemeyer's sketches.

Works on show throughout the other rooms are derived from varying disciplines, but are all inspired by that single, gleaming material. 'Some works are essentially conceptual and work with gold as a metaphor, straying from its material properties,' says curator Marcello Dantas. 'Other [pieces] create a dialogue with the material and its unique softness, colour and conductivity. But all the pieces on show are ultimately interested in the role of gold in our society.'

Highlighting H Stern's unique collaborative bent, on show are necklaces inspired by Corpo Escola de Dança, the Belo Horizonte contemporary dance company famed for reinterpreting traditional Brazilian dance forms. The group's collaboration with the Brazilian jeweller began in 1992 with a collection of gold earrings and rings in subtle, hammered finishes. Named after the company's ballets, they were inspired by the shapes of the dancers' moving forms.

Other pieces include sibling designers the Campana Brothers, who have created a densely fringed gold stole using 80,000 strands of 18-carat gold thread. A gold necklace-dress composed of a chain that drapes lightly around the body is also a must-see. The next fortnight is the last chance for visitors to see 'Ouro', which finishes on 5 January 2015 before travelling to London.

ADDRESS

Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil
Rua Álvares Penteado, 112
Sao Paulo
Brazil

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New York design gallery Espasso has long flown the flag for Brazilian furniture and design, a subject equally close to our own hearts. Its latest undertaking opening tomorrow, 'Compasso', sees the gallery host the reissue of an exciting selection of furniture pieces by two Brazilian design legends: Oscar Niemeyer and Jorge Zalszupin.

The collection on display comprises four pieces by Niemeyer and a whopping 20 from Zalszupin. Niemeyer's quartet - comprising the 'Rio' rocking chaise, 'Marquesa' bench, 'Alta' armchair and matching ottoman - was originally designed in the 1970s together with his daughter Ana Niemeyer. Zalszupin's line, meanwhile, spans benches, armchairs, coffee tables and sofas dating back to the 1960s. With production for the latter halted shortly after its launch, and Niemeyer's pieces rarely issued since the 1970s, these designs were almost only sighted as vintage specimens at auction.

Today, they have been brought back from extinction by Etel Interiores in São Paulo, the pioneering furniture-making firm run by Etel Carmona, which holds traditional craftsmanship at its core. It was Carmona who spearheaded the rediscovery of Zalszupin in the mid-Noughties (see W* 177), and reintroduced many of his iconic creations to a new audience. With Carmona at the helm, the revival of Niemeyer and Zalszupin's designs is set to add a fresh dimension to the reputations of two of the most beloved Brazilian designers.

Espasso's showcase will also celebrate the launch of Zalszupin's first monograph, 'Jorge Zalszupin: Design Moderno'. Written by Maria Cecilia Loschiao do Santos, a professor of design at the School of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo, the stylish tome pays tribute to the 85-year-old architect/designer and the creations that came out of L'Atelier, the collective of architects, designers, craftsmen and engineers who helped produce the furniture that would come to represent Brazil in the sixties and seventies.

ADDRESS

Espasso
38 N Moore Street
New York NY 10013

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The wonderful Oscar Niemeyer is at the centre of another tribute, this time for his work on the United Nations headquarters in New York City. Organised by the Mission of Brazil to the UN and our personal bastion of Brazilian culture, Espasso, Niemeyer’s drawings took centre stage during a ceremony last week at the Secretariat Building that he helped design. The drawings are part of the original archives of Fundação Oscar Niemeyer and currently nominated to be included in the international registry of UNESCO’s MOW (Memory of the World) cultural preservation program.

At the opening of the exhibition, delegates and dignitaries, including the the President of the United Nations General Assembly, Vuk Jeremic, and the UN’s Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, paid sincere tribute to Niemeyer by putting into context the task that the 10 architects, known as the UN Board of Design, faced back in 1947.

Over an intense four-month period, the Board of Design considered over fifty plans for the United Nations - an organisation that Niemeyer once said ‘sets the nations of the world in a common direction and gives to the world a sense of security.’ Niemeyer was the youngest of the group.

Jeremic said, 'In memory of the life of the last design board member who passed away, we pay tribute to them all. [They] attempt[ed] to translate the hopes and ideals of the fledgling international organisation into an architectural landmark. Lacking a common spoken language, they communicated not with words but through sketches and plans that they exchanged with one another.'

In his address, Ban Ki-Moon continued, 'Our architects were ahead of the times. I hope we will follow their example and stay at the vanguard when it comes to solving global problems.'

In his keynote address, the esteemed architecture critic Paul Goldberger paid tribute to 'the last surviving member of a group that gave the United Nations its form; a form that was consciously intended to symbolise the new world [that] the 20th century was making, and to create the architectural equivalent of the new political world that the UN organization sought to bring into being.'

The commemorative tribute comes weeks before the renovation of the General Assembly Hall, a place where world leaders have congregated for over six decades. The buildings have come to represent equality, mutual respect, security and peace – values that are even rare finds in the most elevated forms of architecture. To sum up the significance of the buildings, Jeremic used the words of Wallace K. Harrison, the director of planning when they were unveiled: 'I feel like we have built not a symbol of peace, but the workshop for peace.'

A sad farewell to iconic Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, who passed away in Rio de Janeiro yesterday just a few days before his 105th birthday, leaving a rich and unique architectural legacy in his home country and around the world.

We met with the design legend during our Born in Brazil adventure two years ago and looked with admiration at his seminal projects in Brasilia, where he masterminded landmark governmental, residential and cultural buildings, such as the Cathedral of Brasilia, the country's National Congress and the National Theatre.

His work, such as the Ravello auditorium in Italy, his prefabricated schools across Brazil, his complex at Ibirapuera Park in Sao Paulo and his Cultural Centre at Goiania - awarded Best Public Building in the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2007 - was immensely influential on the global architecture scene, defined 20th century Brazilian architecture, and frequently graced the pages of wallpaper*. Niemeyer was the last of the great Modernists and he will always be cited among the last century's most important architects.

You don't have to be an architecture expert to have heard of Brasilia. Contemporary Brazil's renowned capital was purpose-built in 1960, featuring a grand urban plan by Lúcio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer as its iconic principle architect and Roberto Burle Marx as the landscape designer, plus buildings from some of the country's finest architects.

Its urban planning design has been an example and universal reference to architects and urban planners ever since. And it was all beautifully designed in the era's most forward thinking style - the International Style - which Brazil took and made its own.

Today, home to some 2.6 million Brazilians and a listed UNESCO World Heritage Site, Brasilia is marking its 50th anniversary. Photographer Leonardo Finotti visited the Brazilian capital for this celebration and presented us with 50 great Brasilia buildings, one for each year of the city's much celebrated existence.

From famous Niemeyer buildings, to lesser known classic modernist structures like the Sarah Hospital by João Filgueiras Lima (Lelé) and the Nilson Nelson Arena by Ícaro Castro Mello - and even a few distinguished and beautiful private residences - our map of Brasilia has it all.