Iconic Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer dies at age of 104

Oscar Niemeyer, a towering figure of modern architecture who designed much of Brazil's futuristic capital, Brasilia, has died at the age of 104.

Niemeyer who worked until near the end of his life on Wednesday and still had 20 works in progress, was also the last vestige of an entire generation of Brazilian communists. Niemeyer "always managed to reconcile his works with his ideology", said Ivan Pinheiro, the secretary general of the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB).

Niemeyer created buildings as diverse as the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park, London; the Penang State Mosque in Malaysia; and the headquarters of the French Communist Party in Paris. The latter building was designed during a period of exile in France, where the architect fled in the 1960s when a military dictatorship seized power in Brazil.

"There are too many injustices. But commitment to the Communist Party provides hope, solidarity, and the realisation that it is possible to struggle together for a better world," he told the French communist daily L'Humanite in 2006.

A pioneer in the use of reinforced concrete to produce soaring, curvaceous forms, Niemeyer designed 600 works around the world. They can be found in countries as far-flung as Algeria, Italy, Israel, the United States and Cuba, whose long-time leader Fidel Castro was one of his personal friends.

In the 1940s, he worked on the headquarters in New York of the recently created United Nations, an initiative that symbolised hopes for a new era of peace after the carnage of the second world war.