Oscar Niemeyer – 12 Quotes

12 Quotes by Oscar Niemeyer

Architecture is invention.

– Oscar Niemeyer

Architecture is my work, and I’ve spent my whole life at a drawing board, but life is more important than architecture. What matters is to improve human beings.

– Oscar Niemeyer

Architecture will always express the technical and social progress of the country in which it is carried out. If we wish to give it the human content that it lacks, we must participate in the political struggle.

– Oscar Niemeyer

I search for surprise in my architecture. A work of art should cause the emotion of newness.

– Oscar Niemeyer

It is not with architecture that one can disseminate any political ideology.

– Oscar Niemeyer

It was the drawing that led me to architecture, the search for light and astonishing forms.

– Oscar Niemeyer

For me beauty is valued more than anything – the beauty that is manifest in a curved line or in an act of creativity.

– Oscar Niemeyer

Form follows beauty.

– Oscar Niemeyer

My work is not about ‘form follows function,’ but ‘form follows beauty’ or, even better, ‘form follows feminine.’

– Oscar Niemeyer

There is no reason to design buildings that are more basic and rectilinear, because with concrete you can cover almost any space.

– Oscar Niemeyer

Humanity needs dreams to be able to survive the miseries of daily existence, even if only for an instant.

– Oscar Niemeyer

Sometimes I lose a whole morning waiting on journalists and other people who look for me. But I always find some time for reading, talking to my friends and feeling what is happening in this world.

– Oscar Niemeyer