The Architect Who Built Through the Laughter

In 1954, a young Brazilian architect named Oscar Niemeyer unrolled his blueprints across a dusty table in the middle of nowhere — literally. The Brazilian government had chosen a barren plateau in the country's interior as the site for a brand-new capital city. Critics in Rio de Janeiro called it madness. European architects dismissed the drawings as fantasy. One French journalist wrote that Brasilia would become "the world's most expensive ghost town."…