OSCAR NIEMEYER | classics and unseen
order to form complex topological surfaces. This dichotomy between the modular and the fluid also explains contemporary architecture’s desire to distance itself from the rationalism and cartesianism of its modern heritage while fostering closer ties with works such as Niemeyer’s, thereby leaving behind the square world of orthogonality and Newtonian science in order to find the excentric world of Einstein’s conception of space and time. Such an opposition between the modular and the fluid can best be illustrated in Niemeyer’s own Poema da Curva in which he refers to Einstein’s “curved world,” and which seems to directly counter Le Corbusier’s Poème de l’Angle Droit, even if by the time Niemeyer wrote his poem, Le Corbusier’s had already abandoned the rectitude of his angles.14 The opposition between the two poems is nonetheless as flagrant as Le Corbusier’s change of mind, which was noted by Niemeyer citing Ozenfant: “Le Corbusier, after having defended the purist discipline and loyalty to the right angle to which he claimed particular rights, seems to have decided to abandon it, having felt in the wind the premises of a new Baroque, coming from elsewhere.”15 Le Corbusier was quick to deny having injected any baroquism in his architecture yet while it remains true that for Le Corbusier, the curve “does permit a more subtle use of space” (his words), a meandering river, does get accused of being “ruinous, difficult and dangerous; it paralyzes.”16 For the French-Swiss architect, a river, like an idea, is ruled by the “law of the meander,” which inevitably throws them both off course and consequently bends their straightness (their metaphoric clarity): “The meander’s loops make something like a figure eight and that’s stupid.”17 The sketch that illustrates this “meander law” was drawn while flying over South America itself and was later incorporated in the Poème de l’Angle Droit where it is approximated with “the rampant the vermiculant the sinuant the reptant,” not to mention “varmin and snakes triggered by the potential of carion.”18 In such a conception, the meander represents what is old
14 Oscar Niemeyer, “Poema da Curva,” in Módulo, #96 (1987): 28; Le Corbusier, Poème de L’Angle Droit (Paris: Editions Connivences, 1989). 15 Oscar Niemeyer, A Forma na Arquitetura (Rio de Janeiro: Avenir Editora, 1980), p. 29-30. 16 Le Corbusier, Urbanisme (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), p. 10. 17 “Les boucles du méandre on fait comme un huit, et c’est imbécile.” Le Corbusier, Precisions (Paris:Éditions Vincent, Fréal & Cie, 1960), p. 143. 18 Le Corbusier, Poème de l’Angle Droit (Paris: Editions Connivences, 1989), p. 35.
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