Oscar Niemeyer - Political and Religious Views

Political and Religious Views

Niemeyer has a leftist political ideology. In 1945 many communist militants which were arrested under Vargas' dictatorship were released, and Niemeyer, who at the time kept an office at Conde Lages (in Glória), decided to shelter some of them there. The experience allowed him to meet Luís Carlos Prestes, perhaps the most important leftist figure in Brazil. After "15 ot 20 days" he gave up the house those new frieds, who came to found the Brazilian Communist Party. Niemeyer the joined the Brazilian Communist Party in 1945 and went to become its president in 1992. Niemeyer was a boy at the time of the Russian Revolution of 1917, and by the Second World War he had become a young idealist. During the military dictatorship of Brazil his office was raided and he was forced into exile in Europe. The Minister of Aeronautics of the time reportedly said that "the place for a communist architect is Moscow." He visited the USSR, met with diverse socialist leaders and became a personal friend of some of them. Fidel Castro once said: "Niemeyer and I are the last Communists of this planet."

Some critics have pointed out the fact that Niemeyer's architecture are oftenly contradictory to this view. His first major work (Pampulha) had a bourgeois character and Brasília was famous for its Palaces. Niemeyer never saw architecture in the same way as Gropius, who defended an a rational and industrial architecture capable of moulding society into the new industrial era. Skeptical about architecture's ability to change the "injust society", Niemeyer defends that such activism should be undertaken politicaly, and thus simplifying architecture for such purposes would be anti-modern (as it would be limiting constructive technology). Niemeyer says: "Our concern is political too – to change the world, ...Architecture is my work, and I've spent my whole life at a drawing board, but life is more important than architecture. What matters is to improve human beings."

With his second wife, he launched the magazine Nosso Caminho (Our Path), with the aim of broadening architectural education. "It is ostensibly about architecture, but takes in literature, philosophy and many other things with the aim of making young people more idealistic, showing them that they live in a selfish world and should try to improve it," said Niemeyer.

Niemeyer has always claimed to be an atheist, basing his beliefs both on the "injustices of this world" and on cosmological principles: "it's a fantastic Universe which humiliates us, and we can't make any use of it. But we are amazed by the power of the human mind . In the end, that's it - you are born, you die, that's it!" . Such convictions never stoped him from designing religious buildings, which spans from small catholic chappels, through orthodox churches and large mosques. He is also sensible to the religious experiences of the believers who use his buildings. In the Cathedral of Brasília, he intended the large glass openings "to connect the people to the sky, where their lord's paradise is."