Contours and the man

At almost 101 years of age, the great Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer's eyesight is pretty much limited to peripheral vision but he is still working.

There are cultural centres in Spain and Chile to be finished and a corporate headquarters in Paraguay. And he is still busy in his native Brazil, the architecture of which he has defined and dominated for more than half a century.

After more than 700 projects and 70 years in the business, Niemeyer can be forgiven for seeming to be a bit on the sidelines.

It is not that he is irrelevant — his bold concrete forms cast in white and set against tropical blues and greens look as fresh and enticing as they did 50 years ago — but he is long past the age at which he needs to court the good opinion of fickle tastemakers.

And so there is a compelling serenity to much of what is on display through October 26 at the Art Museum of the Americas, which is hosting a retrospective devoted to Niemeyer's career.

Niemeyer hasn't chased trends, he hasn't had a silly Post-Modern phase, dabbled in the Zen of glass boxes or blown apart his voluptuous forms in a nod to deconstruction.

His career has had high and low points but it has been consistent.

Search for space

When Niemeyer was born in 1907, slavery had been illegal in Brazil for less than 20 years and even less time had passed since the country booted its last emperor.

Brazil's European-descended elite had one foot in the 20th century and one in feudal times. Much of the rest of the country's population was living in prehistory.

Niemeyer emerged in the 1940s as a left-wing architect looking for creative room within the dictates of the modern style.

Brazil wasn't just looking for a modern identity, it wanted a modern Brazilian identity and the one-size-fits-all boxes of the international style weren't, in fact, fitting very comfortably.

In 1940, Niemeyer designed a church named for St Francis of Assisi as part of suburban development near the city of Pampulha. It was a simple, curving fold of concrete, ornamented with blue tiles.

At a time when other architects were making buildings that looked like bar graphs, Niemeyer gave the world a sine curve, the kind of shape one might doodle on a napkin during a distracted moment. It became a signature gesture.

“Rationalism, limited as it was, did not express the new world of shapes made possible by reinforced concrete,'' Niemeyer wrote, explaining why he “covered the chapel at Pampulha with curves''.

Pampulha, which seemed to connect Brazil's modern ambition with the fluid lines of its Baroque, colonial style, made him famous.

After the end of the Second World War, he was involved in designs (with Le Corbusier) for the new UN complex in New York City. And by the 1950s, he was Brazil's national architect.

In 1956, when the country decided to create Brasilia — its new, modern capital, on a patch of empty high prairie in the nation's centre — Niemeyer was made the chief architect.

“I didn't want it to be cold and technical — the hard, hackneyed purity of straight lines,'' he wrote. “I wanted its appearance to be shapely, dreamy and poetic.''

Few modern cities have entered the imagination as Brasilia has. Like the two bowls of the Niemeyer-designed National Congress, one turned up like a giant basin, the other turned over like a funeral mound, the city seemed to be both futurist and primal at the same time.

Surrealist painters had dreamt of this kind of landscape, a world of basic, iconic shapes, in primary colours, arranged like sculpture on a vast plain. Niemeyer made it real.

One virtue of the exhibition, which is spread over two floors of the museum, is its focus on detail. Brasilia is easily grasped as a monument but harder to fathom as a real place, with texture and grit.

Along with photographs and models of its major buildings, there is also an angel sculpture Niemeyer designed for its cathedral — a church that suggests a giant, crazy tepee of curving concrete beams arranged in a circle.

A wall of decorated tiles demonstrates how the reiteration of a curving form gives unity to Niemeyer's architecture on both the micro- and macroscopic level.

A model of the city's central government axis is a little more troubling. Niemeyer's architecture captured the utopian exuberance of the moment but it is also heavily dependent on the possibilities of the automobile, which seem to be fading fast.

Sparse edifices of beauty

And it is not just a matter of pollution or high fuel prices. A futurist, high-speed, go-where-you-want sensibility is fundamentally built into Niemeyer's aesthetic.

Even the long, wide, curving pedestrian ramps, which are a distinctive feature of his work, seem designed for moving much faster than legs will take you.

His most recent designs, seen in computer renderings, are so chillingly empty, and so spacious, the only proper way to appreciate them would be through some kind of computer flyover, such as Google Earth.

The exhibition would be stronger if it connected Niemeyer more directly to the architects he has influenced (such as Zaha Hadid and their shared jet-age romance with speed).

And if it devoted space to the context from which he emerged. He may have defined 20th-century Brazilian architecture but he didn't invent it.

The work of architects such as Gregori Warchavchik, Alfonso Reidy or Niemeyer's mentor (and the urban planner for Brasilia), Lucio Costa, ought to be given more attention. By avoiding Niemeyer's roots, it inadvertently overstates the case.

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 is not clear if that is a good thing or not. Sometimes we fail to live up to our dreams and sometimes the dream itself was the problem.

Oscar Niemeyer will remain on view through October 26 at the Art Museum of the Americas, Washington.