Oscar Niemeyer
Political and religious views

Niemeyer had a left-wing political ideology. In 1945, many communist militants who were arrested under the Vargas ' dictatorship were released, and Niemeyer sheltered some of them at his office. He met Luís Carlos Prestes, perhaps the most important left-winger in Brazil. After several weeks, he gave up the house to Prestes and his supporters, who founded the Brazilian Communist Party. Niemeyer joined the party in 1945 and became its president in 1992.

During the military dictatorship of Brazil his office was raided and he was forced into exile in Europe. The Minister of Aeronautics of the time reportedly said that "the place for a communist architect is Moscow." He subsequently visited the Soviet Union, meeting with a number of the country's leaders, and in 1963 was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize. Niemeyer was a close friend of Fidel Castro, who often visited his apartment and studio in Brazil. Castro was once quoted as saying "Niemeyer and I are the last communists on this planet." Niemeyer was regularly visited by Hugo Chávez.

Some critics pointed out that Niemeyer's architecture was often in opposition to his views. His first major work, the Church of Saint Francis of Assisi, informally known also as the Church of Pampulha, had a bourgeois character and Brasília was famous for its palaces. Niemeyer never saw architecture in the same way as Walter Gropius, who defended a rational and industrial architecture capable of molding society to make it suitable for the new industrial era. Skeptical about architecture's ability to change an "unjust society", Niemeyer defended that such activism should be undertaken politically. Using architecture for such purposes would be anti-modern (as it would be limiting constructive technology). Niemeyer says: "Our concern is political too – to change the world... Architecture is my work, and I've spent my whole life at a drawing board, but life is more important than architecture. What matters is to improve human beings."

Niemeyer was a lifelong atheist, basing his beliefs both on the "injustices of this world" and on cosmological principles: "It's a fantastic Universe which humiliates us, and we can't make any use of it. But we are amazed by the power of the human mind … in the end, that's it—you are born, you die, that's it!". Such views never stopped him from designing religious buildings, which included small Catholic chapels, huge Orthodox churches and large mosques. He also catered to the spiritual beliefs of the public who facilitated his religious buildings. In the Cathedral of Brasília, he intended for the large glass windows "to connect the people to the sky, where their Lord's paradise is."

He was one of the signatories of the agreement to convene a convention for drafting a world constitution. As a result, for the first time in human history, a World Constituent Assembly convened to draft and adopt a Constitution for the Federation of Earth.
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