On the other hand, faced with the deadline problem that an artist encounters in the making of his art, and with the sometimes disorienting or unexpected result that awaits him at the end of the road, I cannot help but smile when thinking of what Oscar Niemeyer told me, in Rio in 2004 when I had the chance and the honour to meet him. He told me about the extravagant deadlines that had been imposed on him by Brasilia’s design and then her construction, compared to those enjoyed with the creation and progress of the Caminho Niemeyer, the city of Niteroi’s artistic center located in Niteroi Bay’s shores. An estate complex he was working on at the time we met, and which became the current Niemeyer Foundation’s headquarters later.

About Brasilia, he maintained that he had had "time for nothing". As he had often repeated in his writings or in later interviews, every tasks at the time had to chain without respite, everything happened so quickly and simultaneously, all matters had to be carried out at the same time, frontally and at such a crazy pace : from the avalanches of plans conceived and drawn overnight in symbiosis with Urban Planner Lúcio Costa, to the technical consultations with his faithful right-hand man, engineer Joachim Cardoso. From the incessant row of presentations to President Juscelino Kubitschek and the Novacap’s executives up to the endless modifications and the internal struggles and problems linked to the working site…
A situation that prevented the architect of having any time to settle down, to think and to sort out the problems he faced. To mend and correct. Whereas regarding the Caminho project, he said he had all the time to resolutely and peacefully build “this white, immaculate architecture linked to the arts” that he prized so much, as he told me. Consequently, at this point in my story, I admit that the temptation was great to establish a parallel, or rather a correspondence between Oscar Niemeyer's aches that he experienced with Brasilia's design, and those resulting from the Three Traces of Oscar global production’s hassles.