Oscar Niemeyer, the celebrated Brazilian architect who defined the modernist and sensual look of Rio de Janeiro, has died at the age of 104. Niemeyer may have been the last of the great modernist architects and his iconic style and buildings of the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, especially those of the Brasília government, came to define South American modernity. The New York Times’s Nicolai Ouroussoff describes the designs of Niemeyer as “curvaceous, lyrical, hedonistic forms” that were a “counterpoint to reductive notions of modernist architecture as blandly functional.” Born Oscar Ribeiro de Almeida Niemeyer Soares Filho in 1907 in Rio de Janeiro, he attended the National School of Fine Arts, where he was fortunate to work with Le Corbusier on the Brazilian Ministry of Education building as a draftsman. “For me,” Niemeyer once stated, “beauty is valued more than anything––the beauty that is manifest in a curved line or in an act of creativity.” He is famous for his designs for the National Congress of Brazil, the Cathedral of Brasília, the Cultural Complex of the Republic, the Palácio da Alvorada, the Palácio do Planalto, and the Supreme Federal Court of Brasília. He was also known for his 1988 Pritzker Architecture Prize and his radical politics and support of the Communist party. Ouroussoff writes of Niemeyer, “In celebrating both the formal elements and social aims of architecture, his work became a symbolic reminder that the body and the mind, the sensual and the rational, are not necessarily in opposition.”