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Home , Anna Maria Niemeyer, Oscar Niemeyer, Philip Johnson, Roberto Burle Marx

FLUID FORM and SOCIAL CONCERN: The furniture of

By Michael Boyd

Let’s get one thing straight: Oscar Niemeyer is all about the curve(s)—in his buildings, which test the limits of engineering—to his fluid furniture designs, which are at once avant-garde, refined, casual, and comfortable. He has repeatedly preached about the curve, and we have seen the soaring, languid, results from Pampulha (fig. 1) in 1941, to the Niteroi Museum of Contemporary Art (fig. 2) in 1992, even up to the moment--the temporary Serpentine Gallery Pavillion (fig. 3) in London in 2003. Engineers have had difficulty calculating his structures, and architectural historians have had trouble placing his furniture designs in history and context. Behind everything is a wave of lyricism; but this is held together by logical, and sometimes rectilinear, organization. Every sway is counteracted by, and simultaneously defined by, a straight or structural line. In fact, Niemeyer has clarified: “I am not interested in artificially straight lines.” Without the straight line as counterpoint, there would be no undulating swoops, or gently curving arches in Niemeyer’s compositions for buildings or chairs.

Never one to define himself within a movement, group, or label, Oscar Niemeyer came to international renown as a highly capable young assistant architect to Lucio Costa and , from 1936- 1938, on the Ministry of Education building in . He collaborated with Le Corbusier also on the University of Mangueira, until 1938, when he and Costa designed the Brazilian pavillion for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. By the mid1940s, Niemeyer was back with Le Corbusier, working on the United Nations Headquarters, also with Wallace K. Harrison. Niemeyer’s proposal was the chosen plan, with a small concession to Le Corbusier that he generously agreed to. McCarthy-ism prevented his return to the U.N. project, and politics has kept him away from the ever since. He learned from his tenure with Le Corbusier, but it is quite possible that, later, he, in turn, inspired Corb. Ronchamp and other Corbusian fluid masterpieces clearly show a debt to what could be termed “Niemeyer’s curve.” Le Corbusier’s friend, associate, and client, the French painter Amedee Ozenfant wrote in his memoirs: “After so many years of purist discipline and loyalty to the right angle, Le Corbusier caught wind of the premise of a new from elsewhere, and he seems to have decided to leave aside the honest right-angle.” Whatever the direction of influence, Niemeyer went on, after these early interactions, to what can only be described as the longest and most prolific (not to mention consistent!) career of any 20th century modernist architect, with the possible exception of .

Because a love of humanity is at the root of the maestro’s raison d’etre, he has never been polemical, and he did not feel the need, early in his career, to contribute a chair design to the pantheon of “architects’ chairs” for its own sake. Just to enter the ranks of founding father form-givers who had taken that overly familiar rite of passage, did not sufficiently inspire the young architect. Furniture design, for Niemeyer, was a late development, born out of a desire to reinterpret his own interiors—but it was an organic and evolved decision to pick up the pencil and draw furniture to be produced. In fact, Niemeyer is so non-threatened and refreshingly non-egotistical about the subject of furniture, that he has said that he is equally quite comfortable with designs embodying the “chill…of Mies (fig. 4), or the delirium of Gaudi (fig. 5).”

Although recently, manufacturers have rescued tentative sketches for furniture from older sketchbooks, and put those pieces into production, Niemeyer did not formally and officially begin designing furniture until the , forty years after he became an active and involved architect. The 1970s pieces were executed by, first, Tendo Brasileira, and later by Moveis Teperman, and Mobilier de . His daughter Anna Niemeyer, with whom he has collaborated, has made small editions of pieces from her gallery in . Currently several Niemeyer designs are available from R Gallery in New York, Poltrona Frau in Germany, and a few other smaller makers. The continuity of the furniture designs with the is evident, but, as I mentioned, furniture for Niemeyer was not the early and defining, critical exercise that it was for Mies Van der Rohe, or Le Corbusier, for example. Mies collaborated with Lilly Reich, Le Corbusier with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, and the now- recognized Charlotte Perriand, and Niemeyer, as I mentioned, sometimes works with his daughter, Anna Niemeyer, (e.g. the Rio or Chaise Cadeira de Balanco) (fig. 6). And he sought assistance from talented Brazilian designers and co-designers such as Sergio Rodrigues and Joaquim Tenreiro in his commercial and government interiors. For Niemeyer, it was never a program-pushing motivation--it grew out of style and desire for change. If you just trace the evolution of the interiors of his own house, you can see from period photographs, that he was happy to live with 19th century-designed Thonet bentwood armchairs (a recurring favorite in the interiors of Le Corbusier) and Eames plywood and steel chairs (fig. 7). Always looking deeper into the nature of things, by the 1970s, it’s not surprising that Niemeyer’s attention turned to furniture design. Niemeyer was ready for the challenge: sumptuous chaises, massive yet ethereal chairs and ottomans, and commanding tables replaced the “default” furniture that he had practically employed. His point-of-view was a complimentary combination of Brazilian baroque (Marquesa bench (fig. 8)) and sleek international (floor version seating with ottoman (fig. 9)). North African, Indian, European, Japanese, Moorish, and Colonial influences, are transmitted effortlessly by Niemeyer in the furniture designs--but he is also always embracing the latest technologies, like his buildings, great and small. New advances in materials, joinery, and other production details, inform the “small-scale” just as they have informed the seemingly impossible expanses of his overhangs and other engineering feats in the great public buildings. The curvaceous furniture forms are at once artistic and gestural, seemingly painted into the room, and casual, inviting, and user-friendly. The Rio chaise of 1978 is Niemeyer’s minimal path to elegance. It can be viewed as a quotation from, and commentary on, Thonet, the hugely productive 19th century Viennese furniture firm. The undulating bentwood forms are modernist ready-mades; one could describe the utilitarian designs as proto-modernist. The swaying new plastic form of the leg component for Mesa Tavalo (fig. 10) recalls a single concrete strut on the roof of the National Cathedral at Brasilia (fig. 11). The free- form modernism of the roof of his own house at Canoas, from 1952 (fig. 12), is just as minimal in the “organic” department as Mies’ (1950), or ’s (1949) (fig. 13) is, in the “mechanic” department. An aerial view of these three houses would show that Niemeyer’s minimal form, in its simplest reading, is a bean, and the other two are boxes. Michael Sorkin has referred to Niemeyer’s Canoas house as “the Barcelona Pavillion on acid.” All the above-mentioned architectural designs are the most direct path to singular, self-contained form. The skeleton/structure and the skin are exposed in all three buildings--and in all of Niemeyer’s furniture designs. The brushed steel and leather (and later, ebonized lacquered plywood) club chair and ottoman designed for the Communist Party Headquarters (1965-1970) (fig.14), or the over-stuffed leather lounge chairs (clearly inspired by Le Corbusier’s Grand Comfort chair) (fig. 15) for the National Congress building at Brasilia (fig. 16) combine both of these (curved and straight) approaches--and consequently, they constitute diminutive works of architecture.

With comparisons of Niemeyer’s furniture production to Mies’ and to Le Corbusier’s, it is intuitive to arrive at that of Alvar Aalto’s. Niemeyer is not even programmatic in his organic inclinations—not like Aalto, the naturalist, at his masterpiece, the Mairea (1938) (fig. 17), or the Paimio Sanitorium, 1929, in Finland (fig. 18). These projects make a convincing elegy to the curve. But for Niemeyer, natural beauty can be made from unlikely industrial materials, like steel and plastic, whereas Aalto’s pieces seem to be growing from the ground. Instead, Niemeyer’s preoccupation, if he has one at all besides the endless pursuit of “invention,” is with society, in particular, the down trodden and their eternal plight—in short, with the welfare of, and injustices to, mankind. A deep social concern is what led to the early art and architecture experimentation—all of it in the name of Brazil! Originally Niemeyer was part of a movement (though not officially organized) in Latin America to seek , and merge it with local values. It was a way to the future while recognizing and respecting the past. But he and others, Lucio Costa and Alfonso Reidy from Brazil, and Carlos Villanueva in Venezuela, for example, ultimately cracked the modernist code and went beyond it. Perhaps the most underrated of these architects was the Italian transplant, former Gio Ponti associate, . Her “Bowl” chair (fig. 24) and “Glass House” of 1951, both convey her prowess as a designer, and her deep convictions about the morality and ethics implied in responsible modernist aesthetics. The tropical climate and the simplicity and directness of creating concrete structures afforded possibilities that could not exist any other place in the world, except perhaps the Middle East or India (Niemeyer also worked in Algiers). Although Niemeyer spent many years in exile in France and , running from a dictatorship of anti-Communist military rule in Brazil, he returned to his beloved Rio and the curvy walkways of Copacabana beach (fig. 19), as soon as the political climate allowed. But when he was away he brought the Brazilian landscape with him. Le Volcan (The Volcano) or Maison de la Culture du Havre (fig. 20), in France, echoes the dramatic mountains surrounding Niemeyer’s beloved Rio (fig. 21). So, this background helps to illuminate that a deep sense of “things Brazil” saturates Niemeyer’s furniture design ethos. Although clearly always resolutely modern, Niemeyer’s impetus has never been far from Brazil’s decorative baroque roots and origins. The same traditionalist/modernist quality looms in the works of his fellow I mentioned earlier--frequent associates whom Niemeyer appointed to insure that the interior of his buildings lived up to the promise of the exterior: Sergio Rodrigues (fig. 22) and Joaquim Tenreiro (fig. 23). The context for all of this is Rio-- one of the world’s great international melting pots, and this inspires Niemeyer more than any past or future architecture, more than any dictum of design. His designs reference not only Brazil’s natural beauty, but of course (think of all the sketches)--the female body—both full of curves. , in a visit to Niemeyer, remarked to that Niemeyer handed Gehry a sketch from his desk of “a row of women lying on the beach, alternately chest up and chest down. He told me that explained everything.” (fig. 25) Niemeyer infuses a sense of seduction and into his work, be it building or chair. And at the same time he espouses a poetic lyricism on a platform of social concern-- a populist dream of authentic, serviceable, public architecture and design. Beauty is for everyone in Niemeyer’s view, not a chosen few, so the uplifting power of a design is a functional one. There is an effortlessness and elegance in all of the furniture designs, and as often with architects, the designs are meant to articulate the space that the architect has created. But Niemeyer’s ego has always been in-check, and the modesty and humility radiates from within each object, just as the integrity of each building is self-evident. If there is an evolved and humane modernism, it is surely Niemeyer’s. Unlike Philip Johnson, Paul Rudolph, and other second-generation modernists, there were no trendy excursions into Post-Modern historicism and self-referentiality. Niemeyer’s “built” museums out-number his actualized furniture designs, an astonishing fact, but the “Niemeyer stamp” is present in works of all scales. Hovering slabs sit delicately above fluid structure in the Paris Communist party Headquarters ottoman (fig. 26) that are in concert with the flying saucer-like, cliff-dwelling, Niteroi Museum of Contemporary Art in Sao Paolo. The same piece is also in a similar vein to Mies’ upholstered slab and structural-based Barcelona ottoman. (fig. 27) The design differs distinctly from the Mies design in that it is dynamic, not static—continuous, not separated. The Ravello leather ottoman, by Oscar Niemeyer Studio, released in 2002, by Poltrona Frau (fig. 28), recalls the gently curving arches and sober elegance of the sloping facades of the church at Pampulha. This project opened the door to his “open” style—one that marked the beginning of his quest for “freer architecture, full of curves.”

Designer and engineer, Jean Prouvé, has a reputation that has blossomed dramatically in recent times, based on a reevaluation from the present art historical vantage point. Prouvé and Niemeyer were friendly during Niemeyer’s exile to France and they served together on the committee to choose the architect(s) for the George Pompidou center in Paris. Prouvé seems to have achieved a blend and balance of brutalist functionalism and fashionable “chic”— a singularly 21st century concern. In his chaise Standard, 1934 (fig. 29), alone, Prouve’s tapered folded sheet steel leg, is a logical extension from the engineering of sitting. Support is weighted mathematically—massing of the steel is greatest where the stress load is highest. Yet, there’s an elegance in the final form that is steeped in a vocabulary. Certainly the same point can be made regarding Niemeyer’s output: the same opposition (functionalist vs. fashionable) is present in the Niemeyer design oeuvre. But Niemeyer’s furniture goes on to invite further comparisons: tropical and timeless, baroque and modern, Brazilian and European, formal and casual. He has fashioned furniture that transcends fashion. He has structured structural furniture, but never without an attempt at curvaceous beauty and calligraphic gesture. Niemeyer is an outspoken political figure, but he is careful not to politicize the work. Free of philosophy, fluid in form—this is the duality that defines the furniture pieces.

Above all else, Oscar Niemeyer, then, is interested in freedom--freedom for all people, freedom for buildings to float and glide, for them to defy conventional preconceptions, and freedom for furniture to not necessarily be tied to a manifesto or agenda. He states boldly: “life is more important than architecture.” In the Niemeyer universe, it is enough for furniture and design to be merely comfortable and beautiful—to be free from furniture’s midcentury malady--what George Nelson in his seminal Chairs has referred to as the “slum of legs.” The furniture of Oscar Niemeyer is as “open” as the skies of Brazil. The furniture design has never been in the service of promoting an architectural program. It’s a simple visual: Niemeyer’s buildings organically rise from the sensuous landscape. Integral to the total design, along with the buildings, is gardens, and furniture. Roberto Burle-Marx, the landscape architect and frequent Niemeyer collaborator, corrals and organizes the natural beauty (fig. 30). The furniture forms are sympathetically unfussy and complete the picture. They are free of political interpretation and the usual blistering “architect-star” media hype. The final designs are organically arrived at. They are natural, unselfconscious, and liberating—inspired by an innate Brazilian love of easy living. They are reminiscent of a cool Copacabana breeze or a Jobim samba blowing in from Ipanema. Niemeyer, himself, believes that “the ultimate task of the architect is to dream.” Seeking at the outset, only “courage and plastic freedom,” Niemeyer, in every facet of his design efforts, may be more akin to a sculptor than an architect. Though inarguably a cultivated minister of , humility is the primary ingredient in the man and in his art forms, big and small. Lauro Cavalcanti, the architecture historian, has pointed out succinctly: “In the end, Oscar Niemeyer represents modernism as a style without the usual ideology.” (fig. 31)(fig. 32)

Bibliography: Marc Emery, Furniture by Architects, New York, 1983, pp. 188-190 David Underwood, Oscar Niemeyer and the , New York, 1994 Jean Petit, Niemeyer, Poete d’Architecture, Kugano, 1995 David Hanks and Anne Hoy, Design for Living: Furniture and Lighting 1950-2000, Paris, 2000 Matthieu Salvaing, Oscar Niemeyer, Assouline, 2002 New York Oscar Niemeyer, The Curves of Time: the memoirs of Oscar Niemeyer, Phaidon, 2000, London Lina Bo Bardi, Casa de Vidro, Blau, Lisbon, 1999

Illustrations: 1) Niemeyer, Pamphula, 1941 2) Niemeyer, Niteroi Museum of Contemporary Art 3) Niemeyer, Serpentine Gallery, London, 2003 4) Mies Van der Rohe, MR 20 arm chair, 1927 5) Antonio Gaudi, side chair for Casa Calvet, 1898-1904 6) Niemeyer, with , Rio or Chaise Cadeira de Balanco, 1978 7) Niemeyer, 1950s and 1960s interiors @ Canoas, with 19th century Thonet and 1946 Eames DCMs in situ 8) Niemeyer, Marquesa bench 9) Niemeyer, floor version seating with ottoman 10) Niemeyer, Mesa Tavalo, glass and brushed steel dining table, 1985 11) Niemeyer, Cathedral at Brasilia (roof detail) 12) Niemeyer, Canoas House, 1952 (aerial view) 13) Philip Johnson, Glass House, 1949 (aerial view) 14) Niemeyer, Leather club chair from the Paris Communist party Headquarters, 1965-1970 15) Le Corbusier, early (loose-cushioned)version of the Grand Comfort chair by Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, and Charlotte Perriand, 1928 16) Niemeyer, Leather armchair for the Congress building at Brasilia, 17) Alvar Aalto, Villa Mairea, interior view stressing organic impulse 18) Alvar Aalto, reclining bentwood chaise for Artek 19) Roberto Burle-Marx, curved stone walk ways at Copacabana Beach 20) Niemeyer, Le Volcan, Ministry de la Culture, , France 21) Rio de Janeiro, dramatic mountain view 22) Sergio Rodrigues’ Sheriff sofa or Sheriff armchair, c. 1970 23) Joaquim Tenreiro, Three-legged chair, c. 1970 24) Lino Bo Bardi, the architect’s own home, Casa de Vidro (the Glass House), 1950/51 25) Niemeyer, nude sketch of women at beach 26) Niemeyer, Paris Communist Party Headquarters ottoman, c. 1970 27) Mies Van der Rohe, Barcelona ottoman, 1929 28) Niemeyer, Ravello leather ottoman, Oscar Niemeyer studio, 2002 29) Jean Prouvé chaise Standard, 1934 30) Roberto Burle-Marx, landscape at his own house, Rio 31) Niemeyer, Strick House, 1964: rectilinear roof system (detail) 32) Niemeyer, Strick House, 1964: organic hardscape at entry garden (aerial view)