Life is very fleeting. It’s important to be gentle and optimistic. We look behind and think what we’ve done in this life has been good. It was simple… - Oscar Niemeyer

Here, then, is what I wanted to tell you of my architecture. I created it with courage and idealism, but also with an awareness of the fact that what is important is life, friends and attempting to make this unjust world a better place in which to live.

Architecture for me has always begun with drawing. When I was very little my mother said I used to draw in the air with my fingers. I needed a pencil. Once I could hold one, I have drawn every day since. The buildings do appear on paper the way you say, but they are not the result of gratuitous brushstrokes. The pencil is guided by so many thoughts stored away in my mental library. But, when I have looked at the site for a building, considered its budget and thought of how it might be built, and what it might be, the drawings come very quickly. I pick up my pen. It flows. A building appears. There it is. There is nothing more to say.

It's funny, the power of beauty, to make us forget such injustice. É estranho o poder da beleza, que nos faz esquecer tanta injustiça.