FLUID FORM and SOCIAL CONCERN: The furniture of Oscar Niemeyer 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 Le Corbusier, from 1936- 1938, on the Ministry of Education building in Rio de Janeiro. 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 United States 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 baroque 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 Frank Lloyd Wright. 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 1970s, 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 France. His daughter Anna Niemeyer, with whom he has collaborated, has made small editions of pieces from her gallery in Brazil. 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 architecture 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 modernism (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’ Farnsworth House (1950), or Philip Johnson’s Glass House (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 Paris 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 Villa 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 modernity, 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, Lina Bo Bardi. 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).