Oscar Niemeyer was one of the most innovative, prolific and daring architects of the last 60 years.

    He developed a distinct and highly personal style that has become synonymous with Brazil’s modernist architecture. It captured the spirit of the time and place, the zeitgeist. White or natural reinforced concrete and primary-colour accents, combined with whimsical ideas in his projects are his signatures. Rejecting the cube shapes favoured by his modernist predecessors, he devised some of the world’s most striking buildings - monumental, curving concrete and glass structures which almost defy description. “Curves”, he wrote, “make up the entire universe, the curved universe of Einstein”.

    The work which is regarded as the ultimate expression of Niemeyer’s approach to architectural design is Brasília  an entire city carved out of the barren reddish Brazilian plateau.

    His long-time friend and colleague Lúcio Costa laid out the street plan in the shape of an aeroplane. They then designed a huge number of the city’s residential, commercial and government buildings, which include the Itamaraty Palace. With reinforced concrete arches reflected in a mirror of water, with islands of tropical plants, the headquarters of the Foreign Office provides an unbelievable study in contrast of elements - it has the ethereal appearance of a floating palace built of glass.

    When assessing his legacy, many an expert has pointed out that the excess of form and individuality in his oeuvre sidelined the social function of modern architecture.

    Many criticize Brasília for being impersonal and elitist but 60 years on more than three million people live here and it is the only modern city to be named a Unesco World Heritage site.

The BBC. Obituary: Oscar Niemeyer, 2012 (adapted).

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    It has been almost a generation since Sebastião
Salgado first published Exodus in 2000, but the story it
tells, of fraught human movement around the globe, has
changed little in all these years. The push and pull factors
[5] may shift, the nexus of conflict relocates from Rwanda to
Syria, but the people who leave their homes tell the same
tale: deprivation, hardship, and glimmers of hope, plotted
along a journey of great psychological, as well as physical,
toil.
[10]     Salgado spent six years with migrant peoples,
visiting various countries all over the world to document
displacement on the road, in camps, and in overcrowded
city slums where new arrivals often end up. His images
feature those who know where they are going and those
[15] who are simply in flight, relieved to be alive. The faces he
meets present dignity and compassion in the most bitter of
circumstances, but also the many ravaged marks of
violence, hatred, and greed.
    With his particular eye for detail and motion,
[20] Salgado captures the heart-stopping moments of migratory
movement, as much as the mass flux. There are laden
trucks, crowded boats, and camps stretched out to a
clouded horizon, and then there is the small, bandaged leg;
the fingerprint on a page; the interview with a border
[25] guard. Insisting on the scale of the migrant phenomenon,
Salgado also asserts, with characteristic humanism, the
personal story within the overwhelming numbers. Against
the indistinct faces of televised footage or the crowds
caught beneath a newspaper headline, what we find here
[30] are portraits of individual identities, even in the abyss of a
lost land, home, and, often, loved ones.

Humanity on the move: Sebastião Salgado’s searing account of exiles, migrants, and refugees. Internet: www.taschen.com (adapted).

Considering the text on Exodus and the photograph taken by Salgado, of refugee camp in Rwanda, judge the following item.

[1]   One may say that Oscar Niemeyer had a perspective 

on life completely different to that of many of those working 

elsewhere in modern architecture. He began life as a modernist, 

[4] but gradually forged an architectural style that was both unique 

and ahead of its time, a symbol of the colour and lust for life of 

his native Brazil. He once told a newspaper: ‘Mine is an 

[7] architecture of curves; the body of a woman, the sinuous rivers, 

the waves of the sea’.  

        Through his professional life, Niemeyer retained 

[10] defining traits of the Modernists. However, the Brazilian 

simply didn’t have the mass-production mindset natural to the 

European modernists, obsessed with finding ways of building 

[13] cheap housing for the multitudes. Niemeyer would ask ‘How 

can you repeat a house that has specific level curves, a certain 

light or a landscape? How can you build it over again?’ He 

[16] explained later: ‘It was not the imposition of the right angle 

which made me mad, but the obsessive concern of an 

architectonical purity, of structural logic, of the systematic 

[19] campaign against the free and creative shape.’ 

Gaynor Aaltonen. The history of architecture: iconic buildings throughout the ages. London: Arcturus, 2008, p. 615-621 (adapted)

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