ART

CONCRETE ISLAND

By Crash redaction

Architect Oscar Niemeyer earned an international reputation built on the strength of his world-renowned projects, including the planned city of Brasília. After studying at the School of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro in the 1930s, he joined the agency of Lucio Costa, a friend and frequent collaborator of Le Corbusier. Later working on his own account, Niemeyer met with Juscelino Kubitschek, then mayor of Belo Horizonte. After ascending to the national presidency, Kubitschek decided to design a new capital for Brazil, with Niemeyer as the obvious choice to design its principal buildings. When the city was inaugurated in 1960, Niemeyer rose to worldwide fame, but was soon forced to flee the military dictatorship in 1964. He then sought refuge in France, where he received several commissions from the French Communist Party and André Malraux, then serving as Minister of Cultural Affairs.

At that time, he opened his agency on the Champs-Élysées and built several emblematic buildings, such as the French Communist Party headquarters in Paris and the cultural center in Le Havre known as « Le Volcan ». He would not return to Brazil until 1981. The new book entitled, Oscar Niemeyer En France, un exil créatif (« Oscar Niemeyer in France, a creative exile »), written by Vanessa Grossman and Benoît Pourreau, sets out to highlight some of the architect’s lesser-known projects, including homes in the south of France (Villa Nara Mondadori, Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat), public housing developments (Grasse, Dieppe and Villejuif) and office buildings (Renault in Boulogne-Billancourt, La Défense). Niemeyer also built several iconic buildings in Seine-Saint-Denis, such as the headquarters of the newspaper L’Humanité in Saint-Denis and the Bourse Départementale du Travail in Bobigny. The latter is a markedly futuristic building in which we decided to photograph a series dedicated to the Louis Vuitton 2022 Cruise collection, a perfect fit with Nicolas Ghesquière’s passion for modernist and brutalist architecture and Niemeyer in particular…

Oscar Niemeyer En France, Un exil créatif, by Vanessa Grossman and Benoît Pouvreau, Edition du Patrimoine, Centre des Musées Nationaux.

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