Espace Oscar Niemeyer is a cultural center designed by Oscar Niemeyer in the port city of Le Havre, France. The project’s location is inside the urban reconstruction area conceived by the rationalist architect Auguste Perret after the destruction of the city’s downtown area in World War II.
The complex houses a performance center called Le Volcan and the city's main library, the Bibliotèque Oscar Niemeyer, and features two central volumes, the larger one hyperbolic in shape and the smaller one cylindrical, a half-buried area and a square. Niemeyer's well-known language, with fluid and curved lines designs, establishes a poetic counterpoint to the rationalist orthogonal scheme that dominates Perret's projects for the neighboring buildings.
A defining point of the project was Niemeyer's decision that the square must be three and a half meters lower than the street level, protecting it from the cold wind and making the esplanade that unifies the project also become a place for permanence and not just movement.
“To photograph Niemeyer, just follow the line. The line tells you everything", comments architectural photographer Paul Clemence, who shared with us a series of recent photos of this work by Oscar Niemeyer and a bit of his experience:
In this project, Niemeyer managed to insert several of his ideas associated with Brasilia in a more balanced way regarding the urban context, giving a more human scale to his sense of monumentality. I don't know if it was the hot sun of those summer days, with the light striking the sculptural forms painted in white, but from the first click, I only imagined these photos in black and white. — Paul Clemence
UNESCO World Heritage Site, becoming the third modern city to join the list, along with Brasilia (1987) and Tel-Aviv (2003), in Israel.
