Oscar Niemeyer, a towering patriarch of modern architecture who shaped the look of contemporary Brazil and whose inventive, curved designs left their mark on cities worldwide, died late on Wednesday. He was 104.
President Dilma Rousseff, whose office sits among the landmark buildings Niemeyer designed for the modernist capital city of Brasilia, paid tribute by calling him “a revolutionary, the mentor of a new architecture, beautiful, logical, and, as he himself defined it, inventive”.
His body will lie in state at the presidential palace.
Starting in the 1930s, Niemeyer’s career spanned nine decades. His distinctive glass and white-concrete buildings include the UN Secretariat in New York