Free forms and anti-colonial utopia: Oscar Niemeyer's University of Constantine

Abstract

This article seeks to investigate the presence of Brazilian intellectuals and technicians involved in Oscar Niemeyer's project for the University of Constantine in Algeria, which is located east of the capital, close to the border with Tunisia, completed in 1969. Interviews were carried out with some of those agents, seeking to recover the memory, mainly from oral sources, and collecting records and documents in order to expand the critical understanding of this work, whose study is comparatively restricted compared to the buildings he created in Europe. Algeria had just emerged from their independence war, and as a result, the new government sought to move away from French cultural influence, which resulted, among other actions, in the invitation to Niemeyer to develop a series of projects, including the University of Constantine, the one of greatest importance. The architect, who was living in France due to Brazil’s military dictatorship, saw this invitation as a way of mobilizing exiled intellectuals from the Universidade de Brasília, appointing them to formulate the new university's teaching program, at the same time taking engineers to lead the construction site, introducing in the country new reinforced concrete techniques already developed in Brazil.