Oscar Niemeyer, born in Rio de Janeiro in 1907, was a bohemian youth until he married Annita Baldo at 21, finished an architecture degree in 1934, and worked in his father’s typography shop to get by. He insisted on working unpaid for Lúcio Costa, the pioneer of Brazilian modernism, and when Costa brought in Le Corbusier for the Ministry of Education and Health in Rio, Niemeyer adapted the plans to the tropics with brise soleil sunbreakers, Roberto Burle Marx gardens, and blue azulejo tiles. By 1939 he was leading the project. In 1940 Belo Horizonte mayor Juscelino Kubitschek gave him Pampulha, a lakeside casino, dance hall, yacht club, and church, where he used reinforced concrete and parabolic arches to make buildings curve. The archbishop refused to consecrate the Church of St. Francis of Assisi for 16 years.

Niemeyer helped design the United Nations Headquarters with Le Corbusier, but as a communist he was denied US visas and could not take posts at Yale or Harvard. In 1953 Swiss designer Max Bill attacked his curves as decorative indulgence, prompting Niemeyer to pare back his style. In 1956 President Kubitschek asked him to design the civic buildings of Brasília, a new capital on Costa’s plan, built within one presidential term. After the 1964 military coup his office was raided and he went into exile in Paris. He won the Pritzker Prize in 1988, married again at 98, and died in 2012, ten days before turning 105.

• How steel reinforcement lets concrete handle tension and bend into self-supporting parabolic arches
• His rejection of the right angle in favor of rivers, mountains, waves, and Einstein’s curved universe
• Brasília’s superquadras, meant to house ministers and laborers side by side, and why the idea failed
• The French Communist Party headquarters, a Hollywood plastic surgeon’s pavilion, and a Portuguese casino
• The Niterói Contemporary Art Museum, a flying saucer on a cliff designed in his late 80s