Brazil Travel & Tourism News
CURITIBA, Brazil — Museu Oscar Niemeyer, in Curitiba, Paraná, appears on the list ‘The 20 Most Beautiful Museums in the World’. The list, compiled by the influential North American cultural news and critique site Flavorwire, includes some of the world’s most famous museums.
Museu Oscar Niemeyer: Among World’s Most Beautiful
The Oscar Niemeyer Museum appears alongside other architectural gems, such as: the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia; the Guggenheim, Bilbao, Spain; the Musée d’Orsay, Paris; the Louvre, Paris; the Salvador Dali Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida; the Getty Center, Los Angeles and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
The Museo Oscar Niemeyer, also known informally as the Museum of the Eye and designed by Oscar Niemeyer himself, is the only museum in Latin America to appear on the list. The 104-year-old architect is best known outside Brazil for having designed the nation’s capital city, Brasília, along with its governmental buildings.
The museum hosts major national and international exhibitions that come to Brazil and receives about 15,000 visitors every month. Curitiba is the capital of the state of Paraná, in Southern Brazil.
The museum opened in November 2002 with the name Novo Museo, or New Museum. In 2003, the name changed to Museo Oscar Niemeyer, or Oscar Niemeyer Museum, in honor of its famous designer.
Erected in less than seven months at an estimated cost of R$50 million reals — then about $15 million dollars — it has one of the largest exhibition spaces in Brazil, with about 16,000 square meters (172,000 square feet).
In addition to the exhibition space, the museum includes an auditorium with 400 seats, a café, and leisure facilities. The focus of the museum is activity in the visual arts, design, architecture and urbanism.
Oscar Niemeyer, Architect
According to Wikipedia, Niemeyer “(born December 15, 1907) is a Brazilian architect specializing in international modern architecture. In the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s ‘he established himself as one of Modernism’s greatest luminaries,’ while he ‘reshaped Brazil’s identity in the popular imagination and mesmerized architects around the globe.’ During the 1950s while Brasília was starting to develop, Oscar Niemeyer made incredible amounts of contributions to the country by designing many important buildings in Brasília. He is a pioneer in exploring the formal possibilities of reinforced concrete solely for their aesthetic impact. He is currently 104 years old and still working.”
