House Sketches

Like many architects, Oscar Niemeyer’s first project was a residential house. While still a student, Niemeyer designed a modern house for a relative. He later went on to develop important designs for other homes including his own home in Canoes, Rio de Janeiro, and the un-built design for the Edmond de Rothschild house for a desert site near Caesarea in Israel. His own home integrated the physical terrain and botanical foliage of the site. As this sketch depicts, the transparency in the design embraced the surrounding nature. Formally, he melded the strong modernist tradition of geometric regularity with the organic forms prevalent throughout his architecture.