Oscar Niemeyer Quotes

Architecture is invention.

I enter my studio at 9 a.m. I have lunch here, I return right away to my work and I go out to dinner at 8 p.m. My daily tasks vary very much.

I think of myself as no more than 60. What I could do at 60, I can still do now.

When students leave college, they are like children who know nothing about the problems of life, and don’t have a political stance.

My work is not about ‘form follows function,’ but ‘form follows beauty’ or, even better, ‘form follows feminine.’

I am a Brazilian before I am an architect. I cannot separate the two.

My architecture is easy to understand. And enjoy. I hope it also is hard to forget.

Right angles don’t attract me. Nor straight, hard and inflexible lines created by man.

My work is not about “form follows function,” but “form follows beauty” or, even better, “form follows feminine.”

Life is more important than architecture.

When I was very little my mother said I used to draw in the air with my fingers. I needed a pencil. Once I could hold one, I have drawn every day since.

I search for surprise in my architecture. A work of art should cause the emotion of newness.

Architecture was my way of expressing my ideals: to be simple, to create a world equal to everyone, to look at people with optimism, that everyone has a gift. I don’t want anything but general happiness. Why is that bad?

The artistic capability of reinforced concrete is so fantastic – that is the way to go.

Architecture will always express the technical and social progress of the country in which it is carried out. If we wish to give it the human content that it lacks, we must participate in the political struggle.

It is not the right angle that attracts me, nor the straight line, hard and inflexible, created by man. What attracts me is the free and sensual curve – the curve that I find in the mountains of my country, in the sinuous course of its rivers, in the body of the beloved woman.

It was the drawing that led me to architecture, the search for light and astonishing forms.

We hated Bauhaus. It was a bad time in architecture. They just didn’t have any talent. All they had were rules. Even for knives and forks they created rules. Picasso would never have accepted rules. The house is like a machine? No! The mechanical is ugly. The rule is the worst thing. You just want to break it.

Sometimes I lose a whole morning waiting on journalists and other people who look for me. But I always find some time for reading, talking to my friends and feeling what is happening in this world.

My ambition has always been to reduce a building’s support to a minimum. The more we diminish supporting structures, the more audacious and important the architecture is. That has been my life’s work.

The challenge of a cathedral is very good for architectural inventiveness.

Of course, I have given my engineers some headaches over the years, but they go with me. I have always wanted my buildings to be as light as possible, to touch the ground gently, to swoop and soar, and to surprise.

Surprise is key in all art.

Camus says in ‘The Stranger’ that reason is the enemy of imagination. Sometimes you have to put reason aside and make something beautiful.

Form follows beauty.