Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, 104, hospitalised

BRAZILIAN architect Oscar Niemeyer, whose vision helped shape his nation's futuristic capital Brasilia, is in hospital being treated for dehydration, his medical team said Wednesday.

Niemeyer, who is 104 and was hospitalised for three weeks in May with pneumonia, was admitted to Samaritano hospital in Rio de Janeiro on Saturday suffering from dehydration.

"The patient is stable," read a medical bulletin issued on Wednesday, quoting doctor Fernando Gjorup.

Niemeyer "is lucid, breathes without help of machines, and is being fed normally," said the medical report, which was set to be updated on Thursday.

The centenarian, who in 1988 won architecture's most prestigious honor, the Pritzker prize, is considered the father of Brazilian architecture.

Niemeyer's only daughter, Anna Maria Niemeyer, died of emphysema in June at the age of 82.

The famed Brazilian took part in the design of Brasilia in 1960, among 600 other works around the world over the course of his storied career.

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 United Nations headquarters in New York.

In 1956, Niemeyer was appointed chief architect on the ambitious project to provide Brazil with a modern new capital in the Amazonian jungle — an achievement that was to make him one of the world's best-known architects.

Niemeyer was to create some 400 buildings in all, including the Serpentine Gallery in London's Hyde Park, the Penang State Mosque in Malaysia, and the headquarters of the French Communist Party in Paris.

The latter building was designed during a period of exile in France, where the architect, a lifelong Communist, fled in the 1960s when a military dictatorship seized power in Brazil.

A pioneer in the use of reinforced concrete to produce soaring, curvaceous forms, Niemeyer currently has some 20 projects under way in several countries. — AFP