Oscar Niemeyer: house in Canoas, Brazil, 1953
Project type
In Canoas, Barra de Tijuca, a suburb of Rio de Janeiro, Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer built a beautiful home for himself and his family in 1953.
The home rises on the top of a hill overlooking the bay of Rio, affording lovely views. Art historians and critics have called it one of the most important instances of modern architecture. After years of abandonment, the home has now been entirely renovated and will soon house the Niemeyer foundation .
The Brazilian architect, who designed the Mondadori headquarters in Segrate and the Ravello Auditorium, gives concrete form to his concept of the poetics of dwelling in this dream home representing the peak of his formal perfection and revealing a profound organic unity. As French critic Marc Dubois wrote, the design is a true hymn to sensuality, authentic testimony of how fluid, concave forms can soften and humanise the rigid functional limitations of rationalist architecture.
The rounded walls embrace and protect but do not divide, and vast living room windows frame the luxuriant growth around the home which is the centre of the whole design.
The Canoas home has two floors: the bottom level is private, while the collective living areas are on the upper floor.
The interior furnishings, designed by Niemeyer himself with his daughter Ana Maria, give the home a cordial feeling of familiarity which is also evident in the original curved forms occurring all over the home.
The bedroom windows jut out to offer a view of subtropical vegetation; it is the stupendous natural beauty surrounding the home that most strikes the observer and conditions the entire design process. Nature does not appear detached or recreated artificially, but is free to insinuate itself into every corner of the home, as, for instance, in the large piece of granite which juts into the living room from the garden as if it were growing out of the floor.
Beside the pool are sculptures by Niemeyer's friend Alfredo Ceschiatti, whose elegantly curved female bodies fit perfectly into the context of fluctuating forms.
But the relationship between house and landscape changes if we go into the bedrooms: here Niemeyer has designed the rooms to be refuges, with small windows revealing only a tiny part of the luxuriant growth outside.
The concave forms of the architectural elements, almost all made of reinforced cement, create a plastic spatiality which promotes harmonious fusion of interior and exterior and enhances the feeling of oneness with nature. The sinuous roof, supported by piloti, also helps emphasise the form of the home, emphasised by the fluid rhythm of the glass façade offering a beautiful view out over the sea.
Niemeyer wanted to design his home in perfect freedom, gently moulding its contours and adapting them to the irregularity of the terrain; only in this way could he allow vegetation to penetrate the home.His work has been called a dreamy, fantastic architecture made up of emotions and spaces in freedom; the architect himself admits that he discovered the origin of beauty in contemplation of the curves of nature.
All elements making up the Canoas home represent the triumph of plastic architecture, affected in particular by the influence of Le Corbusier; the Brazilian architect gives free reign to his creativity in all of his projects, inspired by the curved lines of the mountains of his homeland.
The critics often put the emphasis on Niemeyer's innovations and the spectacular visual impact of his work, but it is also important to remember its profound spirituality: while his architecture reflects the multiple contradictions of Brazil on the one hand, on the other it is capable of communicating in a universal language which few others have proven capable of expressing.
Floriana De Rosa
Link:
www.vitruvius.com.br/arquitextos/arq003/bases/03tex.asp
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