Chapter One

‘I have always confronted life as an unwavering rebel’
Oscar Niemeyer

‘I shall start by remembering my origins. My name ought to be Oscar Ribeiro Soares or Oscar Ribeiro de Almeida de Niemeyer Soares, but the foreign name prevailed and I became known as Oscar Niemeyer. My ethnic roots are diverse, something I find particularly gratifying. Ribeiro and Soares are Portuguese names, Almeida is Arabic, and Niemeyer is German.’

One Saturday, Oscar Niemeyer visited his architect’s office in Copacabana, much as he would continue to do until his late 90s. Looking out over Roberto Burle Marx’s undulating Avenida Atlântica and the ocean beyond, he wrote the words above as the first page of his memoir. Niemeyer’s origin, however, was Rio de Janeiro; he was born, lived and died as a Carioca. Before his death at the age of 104, he had watched an entire century conquer his hometown. Niemeyer, however, had left as much of a mark on the city as the city had on him.

Each year, for example, tens of thousands of Brazilians still pour into the Sambódromo that he designed in 1982, to sing, dance and pound drums for Rio de Janeiro’s bacchanalian outburst of self-expression, Rio Carnival. And if, as the old adage goes, architecture is frozen music, Niemeyer’s could only be Carnival’s entrancing rhythms: fluid, daring, choreographed. Like a samba dancer preserved mid-hip sway, Niemeyer’s architecture is, above all, curvaceous.

Perhaps it is wrong to write an introduction for a man who does not require one, but Niemeyer was an architect whose signature is not only found on Rio de Janeiro, or Brasília, São Paulo, even Brazil – places with which his name has, posthumously, become synonymous – but signed on cities the world over, including those in the Middle East and North Africa. Having designed six hundred projects during a career of more than 70 years, it is understandable that some may have slipped through the cracks of his bottomless chest of plans and ideas, or lie hidden in the shadow of his built works that attracted the most limelight (for not all made it off paper).

This publication unearths one such unbuilt, seemingly forgotten, project that Niemeyer designed for the region: a ‘leisure island’ he had conceived for Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, in 1981. Why, four decades into his career, did Niemeyer design an all-out master plan for a small island off the coast of a then-small GCC city? Beyond the fact that Niemeyer has passed away and cannot be asked, the answer to the question that this publication is posing, it seems, is not readily available. A certain amount of biographical detail is therefore required; Niemeyer had, after all, once designed a box of chocolates.

‘I was known as a high-spirited and spontaneous personality, a lover of bohemian life-style, while deep inside I nursed a tremendous sorrow when I thought about humanity and life,’ Niemeyer wrote. Though his belief in architecture brought with it a belief in lightness and beauty, he was not an optimist. Niemeyer based his ideas on Sartre’s existentialism, on scientific progress, and on Marx’s doctrine; his membership with the Brazilian Communist Party was no secret.

‘I cannot tell you that my Brazilian Communist Party membership brought me only joy, enhanced knowledge, and the unwavering posture of a leftist which I have always assumed and never denied,’ he wrote, however. ‘This political association has brought multiple hardships to my career.’

In 1964, when Niemeyer had already conceived some of his most celebrated buildings – the UN Headquarters in New York (1947), and, along with Lúcio Costa, Brasília (1956-60) – a military coup d'état deposed Brazil’s then-President João Goulart. The reactionaries were hostile towards Niemeyer: he told them he was a supporter of Cuba and the Soviets, they told him that his latest design, for a new airport terminal in Brasília, would not go ahead – it was too circular. His work – averse to right angles and straight lines – became increasingly rejected, and he would eventually leave behind his beloved Brazilian comrades to join his French, exiling himself to Paris in 1967.

‘I decided to pack up my architecture and my hurt feelings and go abroad. Those who were trying to blackmail me, without realising it, had presented me with the greatest opportunity of my life: to practice my trade as an architect in the Old World and to have them learn to appreciate my nimble forms and curves,’ he would write, with hindsight, of a potential hardship.

Indeed, during his two decades of exile, Niemeyer designed prolifically and prospered; his pen crossed from Belgium to Britain and, as always, back to Brazil. It is interesting to note, as this publication seeks to, however, that the region for which he designed most consistently during this period was the Middle East and North Africa; projects that remain, perhaps, his least-known.

‘After Paris, Algiers was the foreign city where I spent the most time,’ Niemeyer wrote in his memoirs. It is a city he wrote of fondly and, as one that reminded him of Brazil, with nostalgia. ‘I perceived in my Algerian friends many of the traits of my Brazilian brothers, that same optimistic laughter,’ he wrote. And: ‘Occasionally I strolled around the park, checking out the vegetation: the thick palm trees with their layered trunks, the caladiums and philodendrons that reminded me of my tropical homeland.’

On his second day in Algeria, Niemeyer would meet and strike up a quick friendship with then-President Houari Boumediene, the nation’s revolutionary new leader whom Niemeyer described as ‘tall, looking you straight in the eye, wearing a fine combat uniform’, and as someone he ‘found the same enthusiasm in.’

Niemeyer would design a master plan for Boumediene in 1968 that would see Algiers’ urban face reflect the country’s newly independent spirit, along with a monument to revolution. ‘This will serve as an updated social philosophy,’ Niemeyer wrote of his vision, ‘addressed to all without discrimination, because the country belongs to them – without the privileges that capitalism adopted and instituted.'

It would seem Niemeyer designed all of his projects in Algeria as a result of his friendship with Boumediene: ‘Everything changed when Boumediene died. We left the country and anxiously waited for news of our projects. Was the work in Algiers going ahead? Were our designs being faithfully implemented?’ he wrote. One of Niemeyer’s only projects that would be implemented in Algiers was the University of Sciences and Technology Houari Boumediene, in Bab Ezzouar.

Until he returned to Rio de Janeiro in 1985, and in between demitasses of espresso at Paris’ La Coupole, Niemeyer also designed projects for Libya, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in his exile – no small feat for a man afraid of flying.

As in Algeria, Niemeyer was interested in working with newly independent nations, leftist leaders, or governments challenging US interests. His project in Benghazi came four years after Colonel Gaddafi changed the country’s official name to the ‘Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriyah’; those in Saudi Arabia came two years after the nation had led the 1973 oil crisis; and in Lebanon, in 1962, he had designed an International Fair in Tripoli named after Rashid Karami, its leftist prime minister.

Despite only those projects in Lebanon and Algeria making it off paper, the scale of the projects which have since been relegated to Niemeyer’s archival drawers were monumental; reinforced concrete, Niemeyer’s signature, would have been poured into gigantic, free-flowing and futuristic forms unlike any other landmark seen on the Middle East’s postmodern landscape at that time. His designs for Abu Dhabi were no different.

The first Abu Dhabi census in 1968 recorded a population of 35,000; little over a decade later, Niemeyer was designing a starchitect fantasy island for the city. Predating Frank Gehry’s ‘Bilbao effect’, Niemeyer’s proposal would have provided the UAE with an iconic, avant-garde architectural emblem that the relatively new nation could project to the world, much as Brazil had done with Niemeyer’s architecture just a few decades prior.

A total of 15 of Niemeyer’s sketches for Abu Dhabi have been preserved by the Fundação Oscar Niemeyer. Handdrawn and annotated, often little more than a doodle, Niemeyer’s sketches and visions for Abu Dhabi are presented over the following chapters, along with interviews, analyses and reconstructed scale models. An appendix of Oscar Niemeyer’s other works throughout the Middle East and North Africa bookends the publication.

HH Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the late President of the UAE and ruler of Abu Dhabi, once said, in 1998: ‘Thirty years ago we had no buildings, and when we saw buildings in other countries we used to envy them and wonder how we could convince our people to be satisfied with what they had.’

He is also quoted, later, as having said that, ‘No matter how many buildings, foundations, schools and hospitals we build, or how many bridges we raise, all these are material entities. The real spirit behind the progress is the human spirit, the able man with his intellect and capabilities.’

That it was Oscar Niemeyer’s intellect and capabilities that were called upon to design a new vision of Abu Dhabi seems befitting. After all, Niemeyer’s favourite motto was: ‘We have a different task: to create today the past of tomorrow.’