With his affection for curved lines and fluid forms, Oscar Niemeyer was an outsider in the modern architects' club. An admirer and colleague of Le Corbusier in the '30s, Niemeyer ultimately rejected the severity of the International style for more sensual forms. His curvilinear buildings, inspired by the lush landscape of his native Brazil, earned playful derision from the likes of Walter Gropius, who called Niemeyer a "tropical bird of paradise." But the architect's site-specific approach to modernism generated a unique, Brazilian style, most visible in large-scale projects such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Niterói and his designs for Brasília.

Although Niemeyer's public projects attracted international attention, Alan Hess' intelligent monograph argues that the architect's plans for private homes are equally important manifestations of his ideas. Describing each residence in detail — displaying floor plans, sketches, anecdotes, and enticing photographs by Alan Weintraub — Hess charts the evolution of Niemeyer's designs, from modernist rigidity to sweeping, sculptural statements. Spanning 1936 to 2005, this survey rarely leaves the tropical landscape of Brazil, as all but two of Niemeyer's residential designs were built in his homeland.

Hess shows that, while Niemeyer's designs from the '30s were boxy modernist structures, by the early '50s, the buildings began to soar, as the architect mastered the use of poured concrete to generate curving roofs, spiral ramps, and floating staircases. For his own home, built in 1953, and the Edmundo Cavanelas house, from 1954, Niemeyer constructed light, transparent frames with dramatic rooflines and paired them with painterly landscape designs by Roberto Burle Marx. Ironically, the houses became more rigidly rectilinear in the '80s, when the world embraced curves, possibly due to Niemeyer's love of aesthetic antagonism and his belief in synthesis as the path to innovation.

-Bryony Roberts