Oscar Niemeyer - # 33

Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer dies at 104

Oscar Niemeyer has died. He was number 33 on the list.

Architect Oscar Niemeyer, who re-created Brazil's sensuous curves in reinforced concrete and built the capital of Brasilia on the empty central plains as a symbol of the nation's future, died Wednesday. He was 104.

Elisa Barboux, a spokeswoman for the Hospital Samaritano in Rio de Janeiro, confirmed Niemeyer's death and said the cause was a respiratory infection. He had been hospitalized for several weeks and also on separate occasions earlier this year, suffering from kidney problems, pneumonia and dehydration.

In works from Brasilia's crown-shaped cathedral to the undulating French Communist Party building in Paris, Niemeyer shunned the steel-box structures of many modernist architects, finding inspiration in nature's crescents and spirals.

His hallmarks include much of the United Nations complex in New York and the Museum of Modern Art in Niteroi, Brazil, which is perched like a flying saucer across Guanabara Bay from Rio de Janeiro.

"Right angles don't attract me. Nor straight, hard and inflexible lines created by man," he wrote in his 1998 memoir "The Curves of Time." "What attracts me are free and sensual curves. The curves we find in mountains, in the waves of the sea, in the body of the woman we love."

His curves give sweep and grace to Brasilia, the city that opened up Brazil's vast interior in the 1960s and moved the nation's capital from coastal Rio.

Niemeyer designed most of the city's important buildings, while French-born, avant-garde architect Lucio Costa crafted its distinctive airplane-like layout.

Niemeyer left his mark in the flowing concrete of the Cabinet ministries and the monumental dome of the national museum.

Oscar Niemeyer Soares Filho was born Dec. 15, 1907, in Rio de Janeiro, and earned his architecture degree at Rio's School of Fine Arts.

He won the Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architecture in 1970, the Pritzker Architecture Prize from Chicago's Hyatt Foundation in 1988 and the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1998.

Niemeyer never ceased working. He also never abandoned his faith in communism, befriending Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

Until the end, he embraced architecture as a humanist endeavor and rejected criticism that his buildings were more enjoyable to look at than to live or work in"The architect ... must feel that human beings also are important," he said. "Because nothing (else) is important. Life lasts but a minute."