Brazil's Niemeyer designs Spanish landmark as he turns 100
MADRID (AFP) — Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, who celebrates his 100th birthday Saturday, has designed his first building for Spain, a centre that will be shared by seven of the world's greatest cultural institutions.
Work on the 30.5-million-euro (45-million-dollar) Niemeyer Cultural Centre is set to begin in the port area of the small northwestern city of Aviles in March and is expected to last two years.
"Niemeyer has totally thrown himself into this work, he has said it is the project which he has the most fondness and affection for," the subdirector of the centre, Joan Picanyol, told AFP.
"He insists that he will come here when the first stone is laid but we don't know if his doctors will allow it," he added.
The building will feature the curves that Niemyer employed in his most famous works such as Brazil's futuristic capital city Brasilia and his flying saucer-shaped museum in Niteroi, just across the bay from Rio de Janeiro.
"I am not attracted by the angles or the hard and inflexible straight lines created by man," Niemyer said in an interview published in daily Spanish newspaper ABC earlier this month.
"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.
The project, seen as Niemeyer's last great challenge, will feature an auditorium that can seat 1,000 people, a 4,000 square metre (43,000 square feet) gallery, a multiplex cinema and an observatory tower.
Representatives of the world's major cultural centres, including London's Barbican Centre, the Paris Pompidou Centre, New York's Lincoln Centre, the Sydney Opera House, the Alexandria Library in Egypt, the Tokyo International Forum and the Hong Kong Cultural Centre, will gather in Aviles for two days from Friday to discuss the project.
"We don't have a theme which we will specialize in, we don't have a permanent fund works. We want to be an absolutely multidisciplinary centre," said Picanyol.
The building will be built on what was the centre of the city's steel industry in the 1950s and which has since fallen into decline.
Local officials hope it will revive Aviles the way the opening of the Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim museum 10 years ago in Bilbao helped transform the Basque city from a rusty industrial backwater into a buzzy cultural capital.
The idea developed out of a sketch of a building which Niemeyer gave as a gift to local officials in 2005 for the 25th anniversary of the Prince of Asturias Prize which are given out each year in Aviles.
Niemeyer won a Prince of Asturias Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's equivalent of the Nobel prizes, in 1989.
British physicist Stephen Hawking, Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf, US film director Woody Allen and Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho will act as artistic advisors to the centre.
