The political horizons of architecture : Oscar Niemeyer's work from one dictatorship to the next (1937-1964)

Abstract

Oscar Niemeyer's career is inextricably linked with politics. In the fairly linear chronology of his work, public and institutional commissions and projects are numerous, from the Ministry of Education in Rio to the construction of Brasilia and beyond. Despite their apparent coherence, they reveal different forms of action in terms of the design and construction process, and thus reveal changing ways of thinking and practising politics.
Oscar Niemeyer's work, from the dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas (1937-1945) to the military dictatorship (1964-1988), provides the opportunity to launch a number of research projects on architecture and politics. The paper presents four commissions for which Oscar Niemeyer was responsible: the Church of São Francisco in Pampulha, the headquarters of the United Nations in New York, the headquarters of the French Communist Party and the Itamaraty Palace in Brasilia.
We examine the conditions of possibility of these projects as collective and individual works, the interplay between autonomy and heteronomy that they reveal, the power and powerlessness of architectural practice, and the political, administrative, technical and formal intelligences and misintelligences that come together.

Margareth Pereira

Based between Rio de Janeiro and Paris, Margareth Pereira is an architect, urban planner and art and architecture historian. She is a professor in the Doctoral Program in Urban Planning at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and a researcher at Brazil's National Research Center, where she represents her discipline on the national evaluation committee. She has been a visiting professor at the National University of Colombia, the Institut français d'urbanisme and the Institut d'urbanisme de Paris, as well as at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. Her numerous publications focus on mainly Brazilian themes, bringing together art, social sciences and history to examine not only historiography, but also architectural and urban knowledge, and the cultural and built forms of cities in their relationship to politics.