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In 1937, the architecture studio of Lúcio Costa and Carlos Leão , where he worked, won the bid to design the new building of the Ministry of Education in Rio De Janeiro. This project should be seen in the political context of the new Republic: Getúlio Vargas, president of Brazil, wanted to use architecture and urbanism to illustrate the country's transformation from an agricultural coffee-exporting power into an industrialized country.
The project, named the Capanema palace , was extremely bold for the time. It was one of the first large buildings rigorously following modernist standards. The studio even asked for help from the main modernist theoretician, the Swiss architect Le Corbusier. Although he had written diverse books, he had never had the chance to put his ideas into practice, save in some European summer houses, and so soon became a great friend of Lúcio Costa and Niemeyer. Le Corbusier described Niemeyer as a boy prodigy. The palace, finished in 1943, is raised above the street, supporting itself only with columns of concrete that leave the space below free as a public passway. The building joined the biggest names of the Brazilian modernist movement , alongside the tiles of Di Cavalcanti and gardens of Burle Marx .
In 1939 Niemeyer traveled with Lúcio Costa to design the Brazilian pavilion in the New York World's Fair. At a time when Europe and the United States were concentrating their industrial powers on World War II, Brazil was investing in architecture. The country placed itself in the vanguard of international modernist architecture, where it remained until decades later, in large part thanks to the talent of Niemeyer.
In 1940 Niemeyer met Juscelino Kubitschek, who was at the time the mayor of Belo Horizonte, capital of the state of Minas Gerais. He wanted to develop an area to the north of the city called Pampulha , and called Niemeyer to design a series of buildings to be known as the "Pampulha group". This would be Niemeyer's first solo work, at 33 years old.
The building was completed in 1943, and provoked some controversy --- which also meant that Niemayer would come to the attention of the world for the first time. The Catholic Church refused to bless the Church of Saint Francis of Assisi , in part due to its unorthodox form, in part due to the modern mural painted by Di Cavalcanti . The mural was abstract and its only recognizable form was that of a dog, possibly representing Saint Francis of Assisi.
In Pampulha, Niemeyer started to mark his style: he used the structural properties of the armed concrete to give sinuous forms to the building. When Niemeyer draws a building he makes it with the minimum of possible traces, as organic and trembling as a gesture of the hand. However, he denies that his buildings have an aesthetic more important than function: he often wrote elaborate justifications of the details of his projects, wherein he described the function of each curve of the building. He said that if he could not justify an idea in one paragraph, he gave it up. Also later he would say that a form that conveys beauty is useful in itself.
In 1947, his world-wide recognition was confirmed when Niemeyer traveled to the United States to design the headquarters of the United Nations in New York. In the previous year he had received an invitation to teach at Yale University; however, his visa was denied because of his socialist beliefs. In 1950 the first book about his work was published in the USA by Stamo Papadaki .
In Brazil, he designed São Paulo's Ibirapuera (an exposition pavilion) and in 1951 the COPAN . In 1952 he built his own house in Rio De Janeiro, the House the Canoes ( casa das canoas ), which would later become the headquarters of the Oscar Niemeyer Foundation.
Then Juscelino Kubitschek, elected president of Brazil in 1956, once again came in contact with Niemeyer. This time his plans were far more ambitious: he put Niemeyer in the head of Novacap, a project to move the national capital to a depopulated region in the center of the country.
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