Oscar Niemeyer - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Oscar Niemeyer was born in the city of Rio de Janeiro on December 15, 1907. He took his German surname from a German Brazilian grandmother with roots in Hanover, Germany. Niemeyer explained, “my name ought to have been Oscar Ribeiro de Almeida de Niemeyer Soares, or simply Oscar de Almeida Soares, but the foreign surname prevailed and I am known simply as Oscar Niemeyer”. He spent his youth as a typical young Carioca of the time: bohemian and relatively unconcerned with his future. In 1928, at age 21, Niemeyer left school (Santa Antonio Maria Zaccaria Priory school) and married Annita Baldo, daughter of Italian immigrants from Padua. They had one daughter, Anna Maria Niemeyer.

He pursued his passion at the National School of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro (Escola Nacional de Belas Artes) and graduated with a BA in architecture in 1934.

Read more about this topic:  Oscar Niemeyer

Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:

    To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position; and a robust candour never waited to be asked for its opinion.
    George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)

    The authoritarian child-rearing style so often found in working-class families stems in part from the fact that parents see around them so many young people whose lives are touched by the pain and delinquency that so often accompanies a life of poverty. Therefore, these parents live in fear for their children’s future—fear that they’ll lose control, that the children will wind up on the streets or, worse yet, in jail.
    Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)

    Until we devise means of discovering workers who are temperamentally irked by monotony it will be well to take for granted that the majority of human beings cannot safely be regimented at work without relief in the form of education and recreation and pleasant surroundings.
    Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)