Return to Casa das Canoas, the residence of Oscar Niemeyer

In the mid-1950s, Oscar Niemeyer was entering a new chapter of his long life. Trained alongside Lúcio Costa, he had collaborated with Le Corbusier and stirred debate across Brazil with architectures that spoke a new, provocative, and futuristic language. He was also beginning the most ambitious project of those years: the new capital, Brasília. Yet it was in his own house that a manifesto of a “non-aligned” modernism took shape, deeply organic in character, where a rock became the point of origin for an entire architecture – a decade later, Californian modernism would echo it in the Frey House II in Palm Springs – stretching between the curving forms of a transparent pavilion and the water of the sea. Domus first published Casa das Canoas in January 1955 (issue 302), and then returned in June 2007 to revisit it in conversation with its creator, an almost centenarian Niemeyer, still at the height of his practice.

Domus 302, January 1955 This is the house that Oscar Niemeyer built for himself, in Rio, on a beautiful secluded site, within sight of the sea.

The house takes shape from the shape of the land, whose contours it follows without changing. The slope of the land determines its two-story staggered figure. A large stone that emerged from the ground was not touched, but rather included in the architectural solution as a decorative element: it is the center of the composition, between the two sinuous forms of the excavated pool and from the suspended roof. The house is transparent from side to side, to allow a view of the sea even from the inner terrace, a terrace that surrounds the pool and widens amidst the dense trees.

The first floor of the house is one large living room, transparent from side to side to allow a view of the sea. The existing large stonework enters the living room through a glass wall. A curved fifth, lined with wooden slats, demarcates the television area at one end of the large room; another curved, insulated fifth demarcates the dining area at the other end. The staircase descends to the rooms. In the plan is sketched the outline of the roof, which juts out to create an area of shade all around, and which from the pool side extends out to protect an outdoor living area: see photo. 

Domus 905, July 2007

Casa das Canoas, an existential/residential project, reveals a few poetic secrets of the centenarian Master of Modernism. Stefano Casciani talks about the house and his memories of Niemeyer. From his corner surrounded by books, leaning on a desk no deeper than 40 centimetres, Niemeyer pronounced words and sentences - half in Portuguese, half in French, with a prophetic air that is given by his virtually blind eyes - on the world and the significance of his passing through it. He didn't say much about Casa das Canoas.

Oscar Niemeyer

But the second time we met, as we discussed the colours and materials of his architecture, I asked if I could see the house, and he laconically murmured in reply, "I'll have you accompanied by one of our staff. You'll see, the house is modest, but the place is beautiful." He even speaks little of the project in his books of memoirs, at least in the ones he gave me and in the ones I found in the bookstores of Rio. In Meu Sosia e Eu (1992), however, he dwells with a certain amount of sentimentalism on another house that was built in Mendes in 1949: ".. aproveitando um velho galinheiro que dividi em sala, quartos, cozinha, cobrindo-a com telhas de amianto, protegendo sua fechada com treliças de madeira. E a casinha tomou forma, e a trepadeira a cobriu de flores, fazendo-a pitoresca e acolhedora, como um prolungamento do jardim" (by using an old hen house that I divided into a living room, bedroom and kitchen, covering it with asbestos tiles and protecting its facade with a wooden trellis. And the little house took shape, and the vines covered it with flowers, making it picturesque and welcoming, like a continuation of the garden).

The modernist content of the Mendes house is summed up by his friend Eça with sharp witticism: "From house to bamboo grove, and from bamboo grove to house." Niemeyer's idea of residential building, especially in Brazil, has mostly to do with the modernist challenge of bringing the outside indoors and creating continuity between nature and artefact. In Mendes, this is done "literally". It remains a country house, marked by the strong trapeziform geometry of its sides that makes it seem like an imaginative variant of the orthogonal rigour seen in houses by his friend Lucio Costa, such as the Savedra in Correias, the most famous one. Four years after Casa Mendes, Niemeyer took his permanent leave from the straight lines that he had never liked. With Casa das Canoas he finally found freedom.

"Minha preocupação foi projetar essa residência com inteira liberdade, adaptando-a aos desníveis do terreno, sem o modificar, fazendo-a em curvas, de forma a permitir que a vegetação nelas penetrasse, sem a separação ostensiva da linha reta". (My aim was to design this house with complete freedom, adapting it to the site's different levels without modifying them, making it with curves in order to allow vegetation to penetrate without the demonstrative separation of straight lines.)

It was also a kind of warm-up for Brasilia, the last modern city invented from scratch by friend/politician/commissioner/visionary Juscelino Kubitchek, who, freshly elected as President of the Republic, went to pick up Niemeyer precisely at Casa das Canoas. During the car journey to Rio, he asked the architect to help him build Brazil's new capital: "Oscar, we're going to build the Capital together. A modern Capital, the most beautiful one in the world!" Possibly in reference to those heroic times, sooner or later, in the course of every conversation Niemeyer inevitably reaffirms his revolutionary/democratic principles. "A terra aos trabalhadores, Todos contra Bush" (Land to the workers! Everybody against Bush!) are just a few of the slogans Niemeyer likes to use to impress his guests. He pronounces them earnestly, without any of his habitual, irresistible irony that he uses even for his own work: "The house is modest."

It's a pity to have to disagree with an artist that can only feel like a father who is the wisest and most talented of all. But to go to Casa das Canoas means to understand what modern architecture could have been like in Europe if it had been a bit less bigoted and orthodox, or simply if the war had not arrived. In Brazil the war did not arrive, and the Modern Movement was certainly not bigoted or orthodox. And it can be seen in this project: maybe less domestic than many other of Niemeyer's houses, and surely more demonstrative of his idea of tropical modernism. The nature that was encountered and inhabited by choice in 1953 now seems to struggle to resist invading the construction, possibly out of devotion to the man who reinvented its landscape. Its plan libre layout and entirely glazed facade (things that even an early Le Corbusier would have liked) are protected overhead by the invention of a wavy cantilever roof, which here is still a device to shade the windows, a "Poem of the Curve" (instead of a Poème de l'Angle Droit) that would later become autonomous architecture in the Marquise at Ibirapuera park in Sao Paolo. 

Both inside and out, the fingers can touch with almost erotic pleasure the enormous erratic boulders that Niemeyer - preceding all Arte Povera, Conceptual and Land Art - left where they were. He made the building grow around them, turning it into a singular example of natural artefact. Niemeyer's staff member guides his admiring visitor around, quietly explaining the working of the petites machines à habiter found here and there in the project, and pointing out several publications in the small library that is open to the public: old issues of Módulo, small precious monographs in a square format on the "Plano Piloto de Brasilia" by Lucio Costa.The old groundskeeper at Casa das Canoas almost regretfully parts with a few slightl damp copies for just a few cruzeiros. We go back to the car, the road, the city of Babel on the Atlantic. I feel a bit like I have experienced the last age d'or of Modernism in a house that might not exist in the world, just in a parallel universe called Brazil.