I have just finished reading of the architect Oscar Niemeyer’s extraordinary vision, and getting to know him and Brasilia… and, several other books I piled into the night.

‘Human beings do not have solutions; we have solidarity and friendship.’ Our work should in any design and life reflect strength, elegance, and grace. Perhaps all designers should read Jean Paul Sartre’s Nausea. I have re-read it tonight—well, its not night actually anymore… it’s early, I think 6:30ish…

I’ve been reading about the modernist architect Oscar Niemeyer, perhaps the last of the Modernists of the Le Corbusier era. He is very old, 97, but active as ever. There has been very little in the states written or known of him, or maybe cared about, but his influence is perhaps larger than his buildings. He is from South America and Brasilia, and the many buildings he built there have made him a hero, though he didn’t do the actual design. (It is a totally planned city, there are very few, particularly of this size.)

I have always been mesmerized by the city, and would wish to visit there some day. It is an amazing design. If you don’t know much of it, do some research. The actual urban planning was done by Lucio Costa.

Oscar puts a lyrical quality into all of his work, which amazes me as lyrical is about feeling deeply, passionately, and effusively… and it’s about humanity. He puts humanity into his work—such humanity, you can feel it. Perhaps the consummate strength, elegance, and grace is better suggested in the embrace of his ideals on pleasure, elegance, and sex in his work and life.

He was definitely a product of the 50’s Rio. This is interesting as it is a juxtaposed regard of the ideals of “existence is prior to essence,” or maybe it explains the ideals of living within a context of thoughts or ideas that humans have or definitions we have of ourselves. I am mixing the genre’s of my thinking and Oscar’s but I see myself in his self and agree with his thoughts…

Decidedly, we are not human beings who have to relate to reality primarily as an object of knowledge or whose actions should be regulated by rational principles, or as beings who can be defined in terms of their behavior as it looks to or is studied by others. Rather the syntax of ourselves must be re-written constantly and such it might be not in a norm but might come from the ability to look outside of the circle of environment to an anti-environment and frame new meanings for life. We must explore the ordinary of biology and the psychology of life within the open forum of life itself.

The artist must oblige such a position in society if any social aspects of communities and societies might change. I find comfort in Niemeyer’s thoughts of how it is each of us that must change, and the most important thing in our world is not the norms, or the products of the environments, or the architecture or, in his words,’ it is life, friends and this unjust world we must change.’ The last statement is amazing.

One of the things I have gleamed in sidebar from his sense of aesthetic is that you must always be on your toes and explore the progress of technology and form… and that as a citizen you should fight for social change.

Once his daughter took him back to visit Brasilia, to a bar there. He thought, what a lucky man… ‘you invent a city, and then you can have a drink in a bar in your city, the most ordinary thing.’

The ultimate task of the designer is to dream, for without it nothing happens.

You might say Niemeyer was given to wrap Corbusier’s lines into curves. Ever the appreciator of women, he used to say,’ form follows feminine.’ Neimeyer tells of a day when he was daydreaming during a drive to Brasilia. He saw in the clouds the shape of a voluptuous beautiful woman, as all men do at some time or other. “And, she remained there for a long time, looking at me from a distance, as if inviting me to join her,” he wrote. “What I feared happened. Gradually, my girlfriend in the clouds disappeared, her arms expanded in despair.” What a wit born out of the incongruity of imagination.

And within this imagination, he’s captured his own philosophy, “And I felt that this perverse metamorphosis was similar to our own destinies. We are born, grow, struggle, die and disappear forever.”

Sartre, in his writing, speaks of inanimate objects, ‘I look at unstable beings which, in an hour, in a minute, were perhaps going to crumble.’ He imagines, ‘I suppose it is in our laziness that the world can be the same day after day. Today it seems to want to change. And then, ANYTHING, ANYTHING can happen.’

These are some thoughts I am thinking this morning as I read about and consider some preservation of what modernism can be. Mullions, spandrels, chamfered— the vocabulary of design reduces the ideas to a minimalist state… Modernism is a contrast, and it is complexity.

Maybe the implications of our convictions are best priorities as designers all; perhaps the legacy of design will itself be one of social responsibility. Any creditability of modernism is based upon an ideology of conflict. Philip Johnson, one of its voices in architecture over the years, imagined, “Conflict is the father of all things.” It is a commitment against greed, overt commercialization, exploitation, vulgarization and cheapness. It is a search for truth, and it has an immediate way of making the world better by design.

As designers and architects, we can have a profound effect upon society and on behalf of our environment.

Design is about hope and optimism within the ordinary of a fragmented world. Leo Lionni, the artist and designer - a peer within the time of Niemeyer and Corbusier imagines it this way, “As a designer, my values are absolute, to be found and satisfied only deep within myself – where I search for my most naked integrity and where, as a result, I stand mostly alone. As a designer I perform for an audience, I exercise showmanship, I demand attention.”

Up, up and away… like Paris Hilton’s hemline… like Bill Monroe’s Mule Skinner Blues… like too much Starbucks in the early morning… onto the ‘Miesian language of concept, somewhere onto a high cloud of imagination. In our world of explanations and reasons it is not a world of existence. Absolute or absurd? A circle is not absurd, but does it even exist? Often we look but we just don’t see.

end # thoughts for the moment…

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