Speculating in Concrete.(Brief Article)(Interview)

Most people who make it past 90 are happy to putter in the garden or read the papers in pajamas. Oscar Niemeyer goes to work. Every morning, six days a week, you can find him in his penthouse studio, in an elegant art-deco building in Copacabana. When NEWSWEEK's Mac Margolis caught up to him last December, just before his 94th birthday, he was at his desk, marker in hand, surrounded by a pile of project drawings and an attentive flock of colleagues and friends. Excerpts:

MARGOLIS: Tell me about your current projects.

NIEMEYER: [In addition to the Niemeyer Way], I am working on a [museum] complex in Curitiba. I want to speculate in concrete, and do everything that reinforced concrete allows one to do. I recently finished a 25- story hotel and convention center in Moscow. I'd like to slow down a bit, but I am obliged to work because I have a number of commitments. I get to the studio at 9 in the morning and leave at 9 at night. But I do the sort of architecture I like, and am moved by my intuition. My friends and I just got done conducting a course on architecture. We also talked about literature, philosophy, social policy, economics and art. Architects should know about the problems of life.

Once, there was the idea that architecture could help solve the problems of the world.

Ah, that's an ancient idea. Modern architecture was meant to answer the great problems of modern life. But what really counts are day-by-day solutions. We have to live life more simply; we should all be brothers, striving hand in hand and living in peace, and not have so many pretensions. Face it, man is screwed, anyway. He has some possibilities, sure, but lives and dies, like any other creature.