BLOG
Post Reviews Oscar Niemeyer Retrospective
“Niemeyer hasn’t chased trends, he hasn’t had a silly postmodern phase, dabbled in the Zen of glass boxes or blown apart his voluptuous forms in a nod to deconstruction,” Kennicott observes. “His career has had high and low points to be sure, but it has been remarkably consistent.”
He concludes: “Evaluating Niemeyer’s work is likely to make us uneasy, because it has been so obsessively consistent to one idea of the good life — bold, cool curves of oversize concrete set in empty, beautiful places — that has passed us by. And it’s not clear if that’s a good thing or not. Sometimes we fail to live up to our dreams, and sometimes the dream itself was the problem.”