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I remember when I was a kid, about 10 years old,
I liked to draw in the air with my fingers.
My mother would always ask,
"Boy, what are you doing?"
I would say, "I'm drawing!"
It was as if I could see the drawing,
and I would even correct it, if I had to.
I'm an architect,
and I think that drawing led me to architecture.
I was lucky.
My first work was the Pampulha Church, a whole complex,
and I was about 38 years old.
I designed a different kind of church.
It was a church with nothing but curves
I called the painter Portinari
to paint the tiles on the façade.
The building wasn't accepted
for about 2 or 3 years,
then, a smarter Bishop came along and approved it.
Back then, there was a tendency to repeat the same design.
Not anymore.
And I did this over 50 years ago.
President Kubitschek, who built Pampulha,
also built Brasilia.
He came to my office and said,
"Oscar, we built Pampulha, and now we will build the new capital."
That's when the Brasilia adventure started.
We were running against the clock, the city was far away from everything,
and I wanted to make a different kind of architecture.
I knew that time was short,
but that didn't force me to make the design simpler.
For example, when I did the Alvorada Palace,
I did the roof curved,
the columns curved.
A type of column that, back then, didn't exist.
The different forms of these palaces brought some significance to my architecture,
and made it well-known.
Because my focus, since my first project,
was to integrate the arts.
I think that architecture and fine art should come together.
The buildings from the Renaissance period
wouldn't be as important without the paintings inside of them.
When I make a building, I'm not satisfied until
I know that it inspires awe, that it inspires feeling.
When I talk about architecture,
I quickly feel like changing the subject.
I like to talk about the big questions in life and society's problems.
I lived on a street that was on a hill,
and we would run up and down, playing soccer.
Soccer and the beach.
I would leave school, and go straight to the beach.
I remember we would go to the beach at 6 in the morning,
watching the boats arrive full of fish,
and everyone buying fish on the beach.
That red sky in the morning...
The silhouettes of the boats getting closer.
If you talk about women, that's fine.
Women are essential,
and a beautiful woman is amazing.
Nothing is prettier than a woman's perfect body.
We look for the most beautiful shapes,
and sometimes it can be like a woman's body,
but that's not our goal.
We want pure form, something different
that fits our calculations,
and that gives the architectural project
a different feeling.
Architecture is in your head.
We can do a project without picking up a pencil.
If it's a simple problem, I can do the project just sitting here.
I think about the idea, the location,
the project that I'm going to do,
different solutions,
I reach a solution,
I can picture it already finished,
even the interiors.
These are drafts.
Here are some freehand drawings of women.
This is a draft of a sculpture that was built in Cuba.
A dragon?
Yeah. It's capitalism
trying to devour the Cuban people.
This one is very pretty.
This one is in Spain.
It's a museum.
It's being built right now.
The dome is the one I told you about,
that was built in one day.
Tell us what it was like.
Tell us how you saw the dome.
This dome covers the museum,
and it was built using an inflatable system.
It goes up in a matter of hours.
A person could walk by the site when it was empty,
and the next day they would see a 40 meter dome.
It's going to be a very important work in Spain.
It's not ready yet,
but they are already surprised by the shapes that are appearing.
In Europe, there are no complexes like this.
There might be better ones,
but this one is striking, because it's different.
It's a work of art, it's inventive.
Today, architecture is reinforced concrete.
It allows for everything.
There's no reason to work in straight lines.
Sometimes I reduce the supports, and architecture becomes generous...
we can intervene in the structure
and look for the shape that we want.
It's funny how things changed in architecture.
First, houses spreading out along the streets.
In Brazil, for example, they started building two-story houses.
Then they became apartment buildings,
and everything started changing.
In Spain, the cities spread towards the sea,
because that was the natural solution.
Cities are always changing.
Nature itself will change urbanism and architecture.
When water from the ice caps starts coming down with more intensity,
and the seas rise, and they could rise more than 2 meters,
every coastal city
will have to think about this problem,
which is something that comes from nature and changes everything.
We will have to think about public spaces.
Within a city,
life will be independent between neighborhoods
to avoid long walks,
because access to transportation is becoming a serious problem.
When the world becomes a better place, what will happen?
Residences will be simpler,
not divided between slums and palaces.
The great human enterprises,
the theaters, museums and stadiums,
will be even bigger,
because everyone will be able to afford them.
Because, today the poor can't use anything.
They only know architecture from a distance.
At least what I build they can enjoy by looking at it,
because it's surprising, it's different.
But they can't participate in anything.
So, an architect has to be interested in political issues as well.
Just like any citizen.
Life lasts only a minute.
Compared to the universe, you are so small.
Man is not that important.
We have to be simpler.
Don't think you are important, because no one is.
You just have to be more useful.
That's it.