Oscar Niemeyer
Canoas, Rio de Janeiro House
1953
Caitlyn Browning s I write this Case Study, Oscar Niemeyer, at the age of 104, has been hospitalized. Although, it has been stated publicly that he is A 1 stable and was simply dehydrated , his current fragility reminds us even more of the fantastical and wonderfully abstract imprint he left on Modernist architecture. One of few centenarians on this planet, Niemeyer is graciously living through his legacy as a brilliant architectural force and leader of Brazilian Modernism.
As a public figure and known communist, Niemeyer was, perhaps, expected to create social architecture with political motivations, but he was an architect who just wanted to build2 .
“I publicly declare to be a Communist, and those who request my services accept me cordially. They believe in my architecture and in my integrity”3 .
He was a fascinating man with a repetoire of work that spanned all scales, from designs for cities to enormous public buildings to private residences. There is much less documentation of Niemeyer’s residential work. He himself has downplayed his residential designs and often leaves many out of his official lists of work and publications4 . However, the house he built for himself and his family in the Canoas district of Rio, has become a great marker of Niemeyer’s style.
1 ° I prefer the curved shape. It is the human form. One day Le Corbusier said to me: When you design you have the mountains of Rio in your eyes.°
- Oscar Niemeyer, 2000
2 Built between 1951 and 1953, Casa das Canoas is a masterpiece of Niemeyer’s personal semiotics of sensuous, curvaceous shapes, free- flowing space, elegant simplicity, and expressive gestures. It utilizes a basic slab-to-column in reinforced concrete structure5 , in which Niemeyer takes great sensitivities in the curved line and scale of form (illustrated in the slenderness of the columns and the uniform thickness of the slab). He allows the non-uniformities of the surrounding environment to play with the structure, entering and surrounding it as the center of both interior and exterior bound space. The rock, for example, is the core concept around which the entire home is built. It simultaneously penetrates and emerges from the home. From the interior, the rock pushes through the walls and down into the lower level. From the exterior, the rock emerges from the home and slides quietly down into the pool. It plays with the entirety of the structure with permanence and monstrous beauty, in slight echo of the grand Serro do Mar Mountains nearby.
"I am not attracted to straight angles or to the straight line, hard and inflexible, created by man. I am attracted to the free flowing curves. The curves that I find in the mountains of my country, in the sinuousness of its rivers, in the waves of the ocean, and on the body of the beloved woman.” - Oscar Niemeyer
The materiality of the home is extraordinary. The use of glass, steel and concrete balance the artificial and the natural and mitigate structural necessity with sensory experience. His extensive use of glass embraced the natural surroundings, allowing the garden, the ocean, the forest, the mountains and the home to be as one. The flat, curved, concrete roof is surrounded and accentuated by the free-form space already existing. It mediates between the interior and exterior by creating dialogue with the adjacent mountain6 . It floats gently in the air, cloud-like and supported by a select few columns. The pool below mirrors the roof line, linking the house as rising above and the pool as sinking below7 . In Casa das Canoas, Niemeyer takes reprieve from his Corbusian influences of the rectilinear and allows the free formed curve to question Modernist logic. 3 ocean mountain
bed sitting room room bedrooms
rock
casa das canoas
pool
4 diagram one (a) 5 ° The outside is not a fixed limit but a moving matter animated by peristaltic movements, folds and foldings that together make up an inside: they are not something other than the outside, but precisely the inside of the outside.° Gilles Deleuze8
diagram one (b&c) 6 French critic, Marc Dubois, once wrote of the Niemeyer House as a “true hymn to sensuality”, an “authentic testimony of how fluid, concave forms can soften and humanize the rigid functional limitations of rationalist architecture”8 . Around the pool stand sculptures by a friend of Niemeyer’s, Alfredo Ceschiatti9 . Their voluptuous female bodies follow the fluctuating forms of the house. The female form was an obsession for Niemeyer. The curves, the softness, the proportion, the sensuality of the space were, perhaps, Mother Nature as muse. Nature does not constrain, rather, Niemeyer allows it to instruct his design.
The spaces created evoke a sense of freedom, but the flow is limited. Must it end at functionality? What about a responsiveness to the changing environment? What about a form that folded, that reacted, that became active, allowing for a logic of curvilinearity?
7 ° My concern was designing this residence with full freedom, adapting it to the unevenness of the ground, without modifying it, making it into curves, so as to allow them to penetrate the vegetation, without the separation of
overt straight.°
- Oscar Niemeyer 8 Greg Lynn writes of the disjunctions that occur from a logic of contradictions between dissimilar elements in his article “Architectural Curvilinearity”10. He speaks of the dialogue between building and contextual environment as an emblem for the contradictions of contemporary culture11. The Niemeyer House distills the surrounding landscape into an appropriately conflicted (nay, non- conflicted) fusion of in/out, natural/artificial, lush/simple. The house arranges the structural and ephemeral materials of light, space, and material to create an atmosphere of exploration. But what are the potentials of the discontinuous? What are the potentials of a fragmented layering of interstitial connections? Perhaps we may look to D’Arcy Thompson’s “Method of Transformation”1 2 for the potentials of differences in body forms to be seen as pattern transformations rather than as rearrangements of physical component parts. What is the mechanism of shape change?
“A principle of discontinuity … is inherent in all our classifications … nature proceeds from one type to another among organic as well as inorganic forms; and these types vary according to their own parameters, and are defined by physico-mathematical conditions of possibility. In natural history Cuvier’s “types” may not be perfectly chosen nor numerous enough, but types they are; and to seek for stepping-stones across the gaps between is to seek in vain, for ever” 13.
As the forest around the home grows and transforms, how can the architecture respond? Does the house embrace a passive pliancy? Allowing the movement of the Earth (rock) and the changing growth of the vegetation to dictate the experience of the architecture?
The structure remains stagnant, fixed, allowing the outdoor envionment to provide the dyanmics. The outside blends through the inside blends back through the outside... there is no seperation between figure and ground.
What about a form that folded, that reacted, that became active, allowing for a logic of curvilinearity? Views that fold in upon one another as a device of continuity, of differentiation, of becoming. Deleuzain dynamics that evolve to create infinite potentials... to fold, unfold, refold. Can we understand the architecture as a material body with its own intrinsic and extrinsic forces relating to form, growth, and behavior? 9 folded views
clothed connections
to curve upon itself c (d i s) con t i nui t y
layer la yer l a y er l a y e r
diagram two (a) 10 What about a form that folded, that felt, that became active, allowing for a logic of curvilinearity? Views that fold in upon one another as a device of continuity, of differentiation, of becoming. Deleuzain dynamics that evolve to create infinite potentials... to fold, unfold, refold. to fold, unfold, refold... to fold, unfold, refold.. into her body, against her ribs, her energy flows in and out, in and out, in and out.. diagram two (b) 11 ° I am not attraced to straight angles or to the straight line, hard and inflexible, created by man. I am attracted to the free-flowing, sensual curves. The curves that I find in the mountains of my country, in the sinousness of its rivers, in the waves of the ocean, and on the body of the beloved woman.
Curves make up the entire Universe,
the curved Universe of Einstein..°
- Oscar Niemeyer
technique 12 evi Bryant, in his article "The Ontic Principle: Outline of an Object-Oriented Ontology", argues that all differences must make a diference or, from a Deleuzian sense, everything has a reason for existing.15
The fundamental question being (or of being):
Is there a difference?
For Oscar Niemeyer, the greatest difference is between a line and a curve. He establishes that there is a difference, meaning that each univocally is; each must exist with reason.
Niemeyer found technique in the meeting/ union of objects in difference.: the mountains to the rock... the ocean to the pool... the forest to the plant... the clouds to the roofline... the sky to the glass walls...
He found strength in simple geometries and multiplicities amid a tangle of natural imperfections. He found ways to make differences similar while allowing their 'being-ness' to be.
Is the rock in-bounds or out-bounds of the home? It is within the bounds of the architecture. It is within the bounds of the environment. Is it different on the inside than on the outside of the home? What or where or who or how is the difference? technique 13 technique diagram three (a) 14 technique - how diagram three (b,c,d) 15 The space of flows according to Manual Castells16 consists of a primary layer of circuitous electronic impulses, a secondary layer of nodes and hubs, and a tertiary layer of spatial organization. An architecture may find being as a micro-network of social interaction amongst a global macro-network. What comforts can be found in defining space as the expression of society (space is society) and rejecting earlier notions of copy or reflection? Formally, the space asks that the outside blends into the inside. To dwell in the space, Niemeyer places the more private spaces (bathrooms and bedrooms) in the lower level, embedded in the ground and off the sightline of the entrance. The kitchen, office and sitting room remain on the upper level - the places of greater activity with temporal-based interactions bridging into the interactions in nature. Niemeyer allows the flow of nature to govern the space, becoming a mechanism of preservation of home. It is a home he has created, his home in fact. The Casa das Canoas finds essence in authenticity. The quest to blend with the natural becomes a conversation with the environment, in a way, complimenting its most beautiful parts. To dwell, to feel, to see, to smell, to live within the natural.
space 16 °Never believe that smooth space will suffice to save us.° - Deleuze & Guattari17
17 What if network-based flows were to reconcile the cultural, the technological and the natural? What if the beautiful order of each curve were allowed to become lost in an emergent architecture? What if every undulation in the rock became a governing body? The power and intricacies of the network of nature are infinite. Can it be replicated? The architecture of replicates redefines space. Does it cause a reversion back to notions of copy and reflection rather than an a version?
To define Oscar Niemeyer's home in Canoas within self- contained boundaries would be a disservice. He bridges cultural, natural and physical space in a manner which, using Castellian terms, unites our warped, parallel universes on a temporally-based path18.
The larger potentials of the space now exist in the technological realm. What may become of a swarm of differences or of an emergent, responsive form? What may become of expanding the bounded space and the scales of freedom of the Haus in Canoas and allowing the technological to co-govern the space alongside the natural? ... space 18 ... a soft monstrosity
space diagram four 19 references
1 "Oscar Niemeyer Hospitalized: Brazilian Architect At Hospital Samaritano", Huffington Post, accessed October 27, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/17/ brazilian-architect-oscar_0_n_1974763.html
2 Alan Hess, Oscar Niemeyer Houses, Rizzoli International Publications: New York, NY, 2006, p. 13.
3 Oscar Niemeyer, “Testimony”, Meu sosia e eu, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Editroa Revan, 1992.
4 Alan Hess, Oscar Niemeyer Houses, Rizzoli International Publications, New York: NY, 2006, p. 12.
5 Paul Andreas and Ingeborg Flagge. Oscar Niemeyer: A Legend of Modernism, Birkhauser, Basel: Switzerland, 2003, p. 47.
6 Andreas & Flagge, 34.
7 Hess, 30.
8 Gilles Deleuze, "Foucault", Continuum: London, England, 1986, pp. 90-97.
9 Marc Dubois, "Casa das Canoas", accessed October 27, 2012, http://www.vitruvius.com.br/revistas/read/arquitextos/01.003/990
10 Floraina De Rosa, "Oscar Niemeyer: House in Canoas, Brazil, 1953", accessed October 25, 2012, http://www.floornature.com/projects-commerce/project-oscar-niemey- er-house-in-canoas-brazil-1953-4438/
11 Greg Lynn, “Architectural Curvilinearity: The Folded, the Pliant and the Supple,” in Folding in Architecture, AD Profile 1993, No102 ISS: 00038504 pp:8-15.
12 Lynn, 10.
13 D'Arcy Thompson,On growth and form, Cambridge University Press, 1917, p. 793.
14 Thomspon, 1094.
15 Levi Bryant, “The Ontic Principle: Outline of an Object-Oriented Ontology” in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, L. Bryant, N. Srnicek and G. Harman, eds., re.press Melbourne, 2011, ISBN 978-0-980-66835-3 (443 pages), pp. 261-278.
16 Manuel Castells, “The Social Theory of Space and the Theory of the Space of Flows,” in The Rise of the Network Society, John Wiley & Sons, 2000, ISBN: 9780631221401 (624 pages), pp. 410-428.
17 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “1440: The Smooth and the Striated,” in A Thousand Plateaus, University of Minnesota Press, 1987, ISBN 0-8166-1402-4 (612 pages), pp. 474-500.
18 Castells, 428. references
Images:
"Casa das Canoas", Arquitecto, accessed October 25, 2012, http://arquigrafo.wordpress.com/2010/10/15/casa-das-canoas/
"Clássicos da Arquitetura: Casa das Canoas / Oscar Niemeyer", ArchDaily Brasil, accessed October 27, 2012, http://www.archdaily.com.br/14512/classicos-da-arquitetura- casa-das-canoas-oscar-niemeyer/
Floraina De Rosa, "Oscar Niemeyer: House in Canoas, Brazil, 1953", accessed October 25, 2012, http://www.floornature.com/projects-commerce/project-oscar-niemeyer- house-in-canoas-brazil-1953-4438/
"Oscar Niemeyer: Haus in Canoas", http://www.floornature.de/projekte-kultur/projekt-oscar-niemeyer-haus-in-canoas-brasilien-1953-4438/