Life is more important than architecture.
Oscar NiemeyerRead
When you have a large space to conquer, the curve is the natural solution.
Interpretation
Embracing fluid forms and curves can bring beauty and harmony when dealing with expansive spaces.
Oscar Niemeyer's quote emphasizes the importance of using curves in design and architecture, particularly in large spaces. The 'natural solution' refers to how organic, flowing shapes often create a more aesthetically pleasing and harmonious environment, contrasting with rigid and linear designs that may feel confining or artificial.
In practice
An architect might use this quote to inspire a team during the brainstorming phase of a new building project.
Life is more important than architecture.
I deliberately disregarded the right angle and rationalist architecture designed with ruler and square to boldly enter the world of curves and straight lines offered by reinforced concrete... This deliberate protest arose from the environment in which I lived, with its white beaches, its huge mountains, its old baroque churches, and the beautiful suntanned women.
We need to feel that life is important; we need that fantasy so we can live a little better.
Here, then, is what I wanted to tell you of my architecture. I created it with courage and idealism, but also with an awareness of the fact that what is important is life, friends and attempting to make this unjust world a better place in which to live.
I was attracted by the curve β the liberated, sensual curve suggested by the possibilities of new technology yet so often recalled in venerable old baroque churches.
Curves are the essence of my work because they are the essence of Brazil, pure and simple.
The problem of architecture has always been the same throughout time. Its authentic quality is reached through its proportions, and the proportions cost nothing. In fact, most of them are proportions among things, not the things themselves. Art is almost always a question of proportions.
When we paint, whether it is on our bodies for ceremony or on bark or canvas for the market, we're not just painting for fun or profit, we're painting as we always have done to demonstrate our continuing link with our country and the rights and responsibilities we have to it.
The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what youβve seen.
What I used to do with a passion, foolishly and vainly imagining I would change the world for the better, I no longer tolerate in myself or anyone else. But draw, always draw - and WRITE.
Is it wrong, wanting to be at home with your record collection? It's not like collecting records is like collecting stamps, or beermats, or antique thimbles. There's a whole world in here, a nicer, dirtier, more violent, more peaceful, more colorful, sleazier, more dangerous, more loving world than the world I live in; there is history, and geography, and poetry, and countless other things I should have studied at school, including music.
The theater has to impose itself on the public, and not the public on the theater... The word "Art" should be written everywhere, in the auditorium and in the dressing rooms, before the word "Business" gets written there.
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