Concrete Thinking

Alex Bellos  Tell me about your new project at the Serpentine Gallery, London.

Oscar Niemeyer  I was asked to create a pavilion that could be used for several things - meetings, films, a place to hang out; there's a bar too. They wanted a construction that was prefab, so they could move it from one place to another, and they wanted it to be an example of my architecture. It has an entrance ramp that I placed a metre above the ground to make it lighter - that's the type of architecture that I prefer. Inside you have the hall space, the terraces, the covering, a big painting here, a place for pictures, a little cinema ... There will be a small exhibition in it, with some of my work. It's more of a meeting place, though.

AB  That lightness has been a significant feature of your work.

ON  The Brazilian climate permits a lighter, more transparent architecture than in Europe and other countries. Architecture in Brazil is possibly easier to do. There is less need to protect from the climate, so it's not that complicated. With larger buildings my idea is to reduce the number of supports, to make a larger structural plan: more audacious, but simpler since there are less supports.

AB  You were in Brasilia a few months ago. What do you think of it now?

ON  If you go there, whether you like the city or not, you can't say that you've seen anything like it before. That's the main thing in architecture - to make something that you get pleasure from seeing, that it is different. On the other hand, Brasilia is a city like any other. With the passing of time it gets degraded. Too many people. The city isn't limited to a certain number of people. It grows, things get difficult ...

AB  Have your ideas about architecture changed since you designed Brasilia?

ON  They have changed, of course, together with changes in architecture itself, changes in social problems, and changes in technology. Architecture is about know-how. With enough of it you can do whatever you want. The point of architecture is to do different things; architecture is surprise. A French writer - whose name I can't remember - once said, and was correct in saying, that surprise and shock are the characteristics of a work of art. If a work of art doesn't surprise, then it is just repetition.

AB  Why do you work with concrete so much?

ON  When you use it on a large scale it suggests a curve, and my architecture uses many curved elements. It's also the most economical and most logical solution: it's the most practical material in Brazil and the cheapest. When things get better socially, and popular constructions prevail, architecture starts to take a simpler, more humane path. But with this capitalist regime, which is crap, then it's just the rich who use architecture.

AB  How do you think Brasilia has contributed to the image of Brazil?

ON  I don't put that much importance on architecture. I do it. I like it. I know how to draw. I have the imagination to do things differently. But what's important really is life, a better world, everyone joining hands to try to stop what is happening now - things like this unjust war [in Iraq], which is massacring a defenceless people. The history of the world is always changing. Good things happen, bad things happen. What matters in life is the unexpected. You think something will happen but something else does. Free will.

Human beings are fragile, they have no importance or significance. The day that man realizes that he isn't important, that hardly anything is important, life becomes more relaxed, simpler. George Bush, who is a poor devil, thinks he's important. He will die soon and leave a terrible legacy.

AB  Do you think architecture can be political?

ON  Architecture has nothing to do with politics. Architecture doesn't influence anything in life. It's life that influences architecture.

AB  You don't think architecture can have an effect on people?

ON  It can give them pleasure if they think it's pretty, but it doesn't have more influence than that. But it does for people who don't have their own homes, who are stuck in the favela slums. People who were born with no schools to go to. Who stay on the streets until they become adults, robbing, only to become criminals whom society wants to kill. I think Brazil is better at the moment than it was. [President] Lula is popular, he wants to take care of poverty. For the first time the rich are aware that poverty exists. Now is a moment of hope.

AB  Do you prefer drawing or creating architecture?

ON  When you see a theatre, a cathedral, a project, arise from the white paper in front of you that's the magic of architecture. I like drawing. I'm a man like any other. I like women, like you like women. It's nice painting pretty women. I think it's the same everywhere - in France they like painting women.

AB  Your interest in women hasn't decreased?

ON  I like drawing other things too. And I've got work in Italy, in London, Portugal, Norway. I provide for a lot of people, so I need to work. I'd like to stop but I can't. At my age you need to work, otherwise you're fucked.

AB  What brought you to architecture?

ON  Drawing led me to architecture, and I have worked with it all my life.

I am from a bourgeois family. My name should have been Oscar Ribeiro de Almeida de Niemeyer Soares. Ribeiro and Soares are Portuguese names, Almeida is Arabic, Niemeyer is German. I'm a mestiço - great! My family was Catholic; there was a portrait of the Pope on the wall. But when I embarked on life proper,

I didn't believe in anything any more. The world is far too perverse. I've got nothing else to say. What is important isn't architecture. Life is important. Man should be more modest.