Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, who designed some of the 20th Century's most famous modernist buildings, has died just before his 105th birthday. Last year on December 15 he feted his 104th birthday in his Rio workshop overlooking Copacabana beach. He rose to international fame as the architect of the main government buildings in the futuristic Brazilian capital, Brasilia, inaugurated in 1960. During a long career in which he received top professional honors (in 1988, he was awarded the prestigious Pritzker Prize) Mr. Niemeyer also worked with Swiss-born modernist architect Le Corbusier on the UN building in New York and, as a lifelong communist sympathizer, designed the French party's head office in Paris while in exile from Brazil's military rulers. He continued to work on new projects until earlier this year. Last year the official opening of Niemeyer Center (Centro Niemeyer) was held in Aviles, (Asturias, Spain). Through his designs, Mr. Niemeyer protested the "orthodox functionalism" of modern building style that he thought left little room for sensuality. A bikini admirer, he often chose to link his work with Brazil's shapely beach women. "Form follows feminine," he said, twisting architect Louis Sullivan's famous remark about function. For inspiration, he drew on Brazil's colonial heritage with its ornate, baroque architecture, and applied new building materials and methods of construction. He favored reinforced concrete in an economy lacking in steel and created works of voluptuousness and space-age allure: smooth ramps leading to broad esplanades, domes shaped like soup bowls and entire buildings resembling flying saucers. His style was not to everyone's taste, and for a communist some people say his work was not very people-friendly - focusing more on the architecture's form than on its inhabitants or functionality. Niemeyer went on to create more than 600 buildings around the world. His legacy endures in museums, monuments, schools and churches in Brazil and beyond. Many of the designs were initially sketched on a table overlooking his beloved Rio de Janeiro and its famous Copacabana beach, replete with the women, waves and hills from which he drew such inspiration.

In Melbourne, Australia, a new skyscraper will mimic the curves of a famous pop star Beyonce. Her moves have inspired fans at architecture firm Elenberg Fraser to design a 226-meter-high skyscraper that resembles her curvtastic form. Specifically, the building will be homage to the music video for Beyonce's 2013 hit "Ghost." The actual name of the building is the Premiere Tower, located at 134 Spencer Street in downtown Melbourne, which is the second most populated city in Australia after Sydney. Rather than flat or angular exterior walls, the new skyscraper will be composed of a series of waves, bulges, and curves. The designers say this makes the building highly efficient, while also serving as an artistic nod to the fabric-wrapped dancers in Bey's video. The curves really aren't just for show. The building's design it intended to respond to climate, wind changes, and the particular limitations of the site, according to the architecture firm. "This project is the culmination of our significant research," said the firm in a statement. "The complex form - a vertical cantilever - is actually the most effective way to redistribute the building's mass, giving the best results in terms of structural dispersion, frequency oscillation and wind requirements." The project has been financed by the Fragrance Group, a real estate company owned by Singaporean billionaire Koh Wee Meng Premiere. Tower will raise 68 stories over the west end of the city's business district. Inside, there will be 660 residential apartments and a 160-room hotel. Because the tower is tall and thin, most units on any upper floor will have a spectacular view of the cityscape below. In renderings of the interior, we can see that the undulating curves of the building have been brought inside, with ceilings and walls that hint at the building's overall shape.

A day after his death, German architect Frei Otto was named the 2015 winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the field's highest honor. The award typically goes to a living architect. Otto died on 9 March at age 89, so the announcement of the prize, scheduled for March 23, was hastily moved up. The executive director of the prize, Martha Thorne, a former architecture curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, told Otto of the award before he died. Mr. Otto's work grew out of a time of scarcity after World War II, when a shortage of construction materials encouraged him to innovate. One inspiration, he said, was the soap bubble, which showed him how to create the maximum enclosure with the minimum material. Without Frei Otto, many of the structures and buildings of the past 50 years wouldn't exist. Because Otto wasn't just an architect-he was also a brilliant inventor and engineer who pioneered some of the most far-fetched feats of structural engineering ever completed. "Throughout his life," said the citation from the nine-member Pritzker jury, "Frei Otto has produced imaginative, fresh, unprecedented spaces and constructions." Otto's major buildings include the German pavilion at the 1967 International and Universal Exposition in Montreal, roof for Olympic Stadium, Munich in 1972, Tuwaiq Palace, Saudi Arabia, with Buro Happold in 1985 and the Japan Pavilion at Expo 2000 in Hannover, Germany. The award comes with US$ 100,000 and a bronze medallion. It will be presented, presumably to representatives of the architect, on May 15 in Miami Beach. Founded in 1979 by Jay A. Pritzker and his wife Cindy, the award is funded by the Pritzker family and is considered to be one of the world's premier architecture prizes; it is often referred to as the Nobel Prize of architecture. The Pritzker Prize won such architectures, as Frank Gehry, Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel, Oscar Niemeyer, Wang Shu, Toyo Ito . Otto is the second German architect to win the award. The first was Gottfried Boehm, the 1986 winner.