The architect Oscar Niemeyer gave shape to the Brazilian metropolis of Brasília

Brasília/Prague - The Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, who will celebrate his 110th birthday on December 15, is primarily known for the construction of the new capital of the country, Brasília. This city was born according to his architectural designs at the end of the 1950s in just four years.

Oscar Ribeiro de Almeida Niemeyer was born on December 15, 1907, in Rio de Janeiro, where he graduated from the School of Fine Arts. He then started working without pay in the studio of Lucio Costa, a leading figure in Brazilian architecture at the time, where he became involved in many prestigious projects - such as the Ministry of Education and Health building in Rio de Janeiro and a pavilion for the World Expo in New York.

The initiator of the construction of the new Brazilian capital was President Juscelino Kubitschek, who had Czech ancestry. The floor plan of Brasília in the shape of an airplane was conceived by Lucio Costa. However, most of the city’s buildings, which arose in the middle of a harsh wilderness at an altitude of around one thousand meters, were designed by Niemeyer. One of the most famous among them is the almost entirely glass cathedral, resembling a volcano, a flower, or a thorn crown on Jesus's head. In 1987, Brasília was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Besides Brasília, Niemeyer’s works (he is the author of around 600 works in total) can be found almost all over the world. When he had to emigrate from Brazil due to his leftist beliefs after the coup in 1964, he mainly lived in Paris, where he designed, for example, the headquarters of the French Communist Party and an administrative building for Renault. Other of his buildings stand, for instance, in Italy (the Mondadori publishing house), in Algeria he designed a university, in Madeira a casino, and in Penang, Malaysia, the State Mosque.

In 1988, he was awarded the Pritzker Prize, akin to the Nobel Prize in architecture. One of his last projects, a complex of administrative buildings in Belo Horizonte, the capital of the state of Minas Gerais, was ceremoniously opened in the spring of 2010. He passed away ten days before his 105th birthday on December 5, 2012.