“We had two goals when we came to Brazil: dance in Carnival and to revel in the works of Oscar Niemeyer, the Brazilian architectural visionary who passed away last year,” the photographer Magda Biernat and her husband, the illustrator Ian Webster, wrote. “His greatest achievement was helping to create Brasília, Brazil’s capital city, from scratch. Brasília was to be the grand finale on a tour of Niemeyer’s work.”
Magda and Ian began their trip from Antarctica to Alaska in January, and since then have been slowly photographing their way up South America. They arrived in Brazil in time for Carnival, then spent a month travelling through Brazil and photographing Niemeyer’s architecture. “I’ve always wanted to photograph Brasília. As an architectural photographer and fan of the modernist aesthetic, I needed to make a pilgrimage here, especially after Oscar Niemeyer passed away last year,” Magda told me. “But Niemeyer’s work extends so much further than Brasília—we found ourselves making all kinds of detours along the way. I love the clean lines and surfaces, along with his unique use of abstract shape to put an exclamation point on minimalist structures. Brasília’s functionality as a planned city can be argued, but it’s clear that Niemeyer’s contributions to the capital—grand monuments that wink at classical architecture before turning its principals upside down—are a huge success. We were struck by how timeless these perfect examples of modernist principals felt—visions of an idealistic future still waiting to come to pass.”
Earlier dispatches from the Magda and Ian’s trip can be read here, here, and here.
Click on the red arrows [#image: /photos/59096bf8019dfc3494ea17c9]for a full-screen view.
