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.
