It really did seem as if Oscar Niemeyer would live forever. He died on Wednesday, 10 days short of his 105th birthday, his architectural career continuing quite literally to the end—he was still giving direction to employees about ongoing projects from his hospital bed in Rio in his final days. His commitment to the notion that modernism could make life richer, freer, more spirited, and more meaningful also remained fully intact. You could call Niemeyer the last of the true believers, but he was more than that: an extraordinary blend of passion, arrogance, and naivety, seasoned, I suspect, with more than a little craftiness. Other than his mentor, Le Corbusier, whose name was inextricably connected to modern architecture in France, I cannot think of a modern architect whose career was so profoundly tied in the public mind to the life and culture of his country. Niemeyer was not just an architect who came from Brazil; he wasBrazil, as much as Pele or the samba. His swirling forms and his curving lines replaced modernism’s harshness with softness and ease. Niemeyer didn’t compromise modernism’s utopian ideals, but when filtered through his sensibility, the stern, unforgiving rigor of so much European modernism became as smooth as Brazilian jazz. His work is sensuous, almost hedonistic.

His career began in the 1930s, when he worked with Lucio Costa, one of Brazil’s first modernists, and Le Corbusier on the design of the Brazilian Ministry of Education and Health in Rio, which was the first major modernist public building in Brazil. The ministry became a sign to the world that Brazil wanted to make itself a place of cutting-edge architecture, and very quickly Niemeyer began to establish his own style, more flowing and curvaceous than Le Corbusier’s or Costa’s, and so in sync with the image of Brazil that, looking back at his work, it is now difficult to say how much Niemeyer emerged out of an inherently Brazilian attitude toward design and how much his architecture itself created that attitude.

He designed numerous houses that are masterworks of midcentury modernism, with a magical combination of lushness and spareness, and some spectacular high-rise housing and museums. He also played a major role in the design of the United Nations’ headquarters. But nothing in his career equaled Brasilia, the new capital city in the undeveloped center of Brazil whose layout was created by Costa but whose iconic architecture was all designed by Niemeyer. Created in the center of Brazil between 1956 and 1960, Brasilia is profoundly flawed, profoundly beautiful, and profoundly moving—a testament to an entire nation’s belief that the 20th century might truly create a utopian city and that modern architecture could serve as the symbol of Brazil to the world.

That Brasilia is anything but a utopia is, of course, not news. With its wide boulevards and buildings set down in open space like pieces of abstract sculpture, it is hard to imagine a place less attuned to what we now consider the key elements of a workable city. But if you go to Brasilia, you know you will not find a place to walk; it is far better to put aside for a moment the knowledge that cities ought to be made of streets, and take Niemeyer’s exquisite, sumptuous structures for what they are: objects of beauty in which people can be, and often are, inspired to believe in the power of architecture. When I walked through the extraordinary Itamarati Palace, the home of the Foreign Ministry, and the Planato Palace, the office of the president, or looked at the futuristic round cathedral with its splayed ribs, it was like entering an enchanted land in which everyone believed in the future and had confidence that Niemeyer’s beautiful shapes would be the vehicles that would take them there.

Now, of course, Brasilia is a vision of the past far more than of the future, and in some ways it feels as archaic, as disconnected from the world in which we live as the classical colonnades of Washington. But Niemeyer lived long enough to see Brasilia admired, fall out of favor, and be admired again as a triumph of mid-20th-century design, which is how it ought to be seen—not as a model for how the world should live or how cities should be built, but as a thing unto itself, a fully realized product of a set of deeply held beliefs that, at least for a period, were shared by an entire national government.

Niemeyer’s architecture of exuberance was all the more striking because his politics were so far away from the lush, indulgent world that his buildings suggest. He was a lifelong communist, with a serious commitment to left-wing politics far greater than that of any of his peers among the world’s major modernist architects, who often tend to be sanctimonious about design and pragmatic about politics. You could almost say that, for Niemeyer, it was the other way around: he kept his somber idealism for the political realm, his pleasure for architecture alone.

He would pay no small price for his politics. In the 1960s, after a military dictatorship took over the government of Brazil, Niemeyer, even though he had designed the national capital, found himself so out of favor* in his own country that clients fled; he had so little work that he left Brazil and set himself up in Paris,*where he ended up designing the headquarters of the French communist party. (He was denied a visa by the United States during the same period and was never able to fulfill a large American commission for a business center in Miami.) Niemeyer, of course, had the last laugh. He outlasted the military junta by more than a generation and returned to Brazil in the 1980s ready for his final act, which turned out to be another three decades of buildings that never failed to show a passion for sensuous form.