Brazilian architect Niemeyer in hospital

Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, 104, whose vision helped shape his nation’s futuristic capital Brasilia, is in hospital for an undisclosed ailment, officials said yesterday. A spokesman at the Samaritano hospital in Rio de Janeiro said no official bulletin on Niemeyer’s condition has been released since he was admitted last weekend. In May he was hospitalised for pneumonia and dehydration. Niemeyer is considered the father of Brazilian architecture. He took part in the design of Brasilia in 1960, among 600 other works around the world over the course of his storied career. Niemeyer - a pioneer in the use of reinforced concrete to produce soaring, curvaceous forms - currently has some 20 projects under way in several countries. He won the Pritzker prize, architecture’s most prestigious honor, in 1988. His only daughter, Anna Maria Niemeyer, died of emphysema in June at the age of 82. “I am not attracted by the angles or the hard and inflexible straight lines created by man,” Niemeyer, who started his career in the 1930s, once told the Spanish newspaper ABC. “What attracts me is the free and sensual curve, the curve which I find in the mountains of my country, in the flow of its rivers, in the waves of the ocean, in the body of a woman,” he added. In the late 1940s he was a prominent figure - alongside the French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier - on the international panel that conceived the design of the UN headquarters in New York.