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'To create an entirely new capital, from scratch, in the middle of nowhere, was an extraordinarily ambitious thing to try and do...' Prof. Richard J. Williams.

Richard J. Williams

Professor of Contemporary Visual Cultures, University of Edinburgh

20th century

Building Brasília

Brasilia is just the most fascinating place. It's a city that is one of the most ambitious single building projects ever. There is nowhere I can think of that has quite the same sense of space. It has colossal skies. I have never been anywhere quite like that. It's a place that you can fly over and it looks like nowhere else. It's a city that's placed right in the centre of a country and it is imagined as being somewhere that will open up the whole country for development.

Brasilia's got a really long history. It's a creation of a very short period in some ways, but the idea of opening up the interior of Brazil by establishing an inland capital had been around for about, well, the best part of a century, so the people were talking about it towards the end of the Portuguese Colonial period. And then in the 1891 constitution there is provision for a new capital somewhere in the middle of Brazil. It doesn't say any more than that but that's the beginning of the process.

The modern founding of Brasilia starts very precisely in 1955. The then Governor of the State of Mias Gerais, Juscelino Kubitschek, was campaigning to be president. And on the stump, in 1955, someone asked him what was going to happen with this plan in the constitution to build a new capital, and he said, very simply: "We will implement the constitution". And so, for better or worse, he won the election, became president and in 1956 he was faced with the decision of whether to go ahead with this promise. And, well, he did. And he knew that he was going to have to finish it somehow in four years, because that was the length of the presidential term. So, to create an entirely new capital, from scratch, in the middle of nowhere was an extraordinarily ambitious thing to try and do.

A competition was held in 1956 and twenty-six people entered - twenty-six architectural firms entered - from all over the world. It was a, there was an international jury. And in the end the winner was a firm, or in fact an individual Lúcio Costa, a Brazilian planner and architect, who hadn't entered, but was friends with Kubitschek, and with the main architect involved in the central part of Brasilia, Oscar Niemeyer. Niemeyer had already been selected to create the monumental buildings in the centre of the city.

Costa produced an uh extraordinary non-competition entry. It's very simple. It's just on a handful of file cards, and it has some very crude sketches and it begins and it says, "Dear Committee, I'm not really entering this competition, but I've just had this idea and it's sprung to me, and I thought you ought to know about it". It's a very simple, graphic plan for a city. And in the end, through a kind of stitch-up, through you know, friends talking to each other, he won. He was given the job of producing this city. It was a building process which lasted three and a half, four years and it was inaugurated on 21st April 1960.

Lúcio Costa's design for the city - his competition entry that's not a competition entry - it's a very poetic text that's primarily about what kind of symbols, what kind of forms do you need to make a city have the true characteristics of a capital city, and a capital city that implicitly will last forever. He wants something of that for Brasilia right from the beginning. So, the kinds of reference points he puts in there are often the historical reference points.

To make a true capital city you need different scales, you need a magnificent part, you need a ceremonial part, you need a part that maybe is very informal and has little lanes and alleyways.

The plan is startlingly clear from the air. It resonates with primal imagery: it's an aeroplane, it's a bird, it's a sign of the cross, depending on whose account you read. For me, it refers to the pioneering nature of that part of the city rather than the fact that it might look like a plane. So, it's 'pilot' as in an experiment or prototype.

Brazil, you know, had obviously been in existence as an independent nation for seventy years but it was very conscious of it being still a new nation, and politically, it's constantly reinventing itself, so there's always a sense of newness there.

The rhetoric of Brasilia's architects was both liberatory and levelling, and the architecture was designed to bring about a social revolution. But the plan has also been described as conservative, even authoritarian. The crux of it is a great symmetrical boulevard, on an essentially neo-classical plan. Some people think it's there to represent and uphold authority.

The plan is basically a cross. The long axis is the Eixo Rodovia or the highway axis. That's about fourteen kilometres long. It's bisected, right in the middle, by a five kilometre "Eixo Monumental", or the monumental axis. That's the axis that contains all of the government buildings. Right in the middle, where the two axes cross is, in a way, not what you would think. You might think it would be, you know, government buildings or something really monumental. It's not, it's the bus station. And this is one of the most extraordinary bus stations on earth. It's a multi-storey complex. All human life is there. And it has a huge motorway going over the top. It's a very, very complex structure.

It is the only part of the Pilot Plan with the density and richness of more traditional Brazilian cities. And it's a building largely used by the poorer classes, people who are most likely to take the bus, even though it was intended to be a building all about movement and speed and modern Brazil.

Along the Monumental Axis there are clusters of government buildings. They're almost like platonic, ideal forms, very pure, very white, very sculptural. They don't really look like buildings from earth.

Perhaps the most important is the Square of the Three Powers or the *Praça dos Três Poderes*. And that has the Congress, the Presidential Palace is there and it has the Judiciary, and this great big enormous plaza. Then a bit further down the Monumental Axis you've got the cathedral, which is one of the most iconic buildings in the city. It looks like a crown of thorns, where the thorns are the ribs of the cathedral.

When people visit Brasilia, they tend to visit the monuments of the centre. They tend not to go to the residential areas. That's a pity in a way because some of those areas are beautifully done. The residential parts are really a key part of the plan. They're normally known as 'super quadras' or 'super blocks' - a maximum of six storeys -- so quite low - arranged in formal clusters. The architecture is not that interesting of itself, but as a group, these blocks create a really quite seductive environment with lots of planting, sometimes facilities little cafes.

The planning didn't abolish class distinctions by any means, but apartments in the Pilot Plan are suggestive of a more egalitarian way of living, even if such a transformation never really happened.

If you want to see really good Modernist planning the super blocks are one of the places that you can see it.

Brasilia today is a vast sprawling metropolis. Only a small proportion of people live in the Plana Piloto - the Pilot Plan - the centre. Economically it's one of the most successful parts of Brazil. The per capita income is very high. For a middle-class resident of the city it appears to work very well. It's got a sense of, you know, order and safety, relative tranquillity that the Brazilian cities on the coast don't generally have. It's still a place that'svery divided between the centre and the periphery. There are many parts of the periphery which are very poor, where there are colossal divisions of wealth, where personal safety is not assured at all. But, in general, compared to other Brazilian cities, it's regarded as a success.The centre of the city, the Pilot Plan, is often described as a Utopia. It's now preserved, it's now listed by UNESCO, so it's not possible to make any major changes to that.

Niemeyer very very distinctive architect. He got involved before the competition happened because he knew Kubitschek, the president, and the president already commissioned him to design some buildings for the new city. He's somebody who had, had worked with Le Corbusier early in the twentieth century. He'd taken on board lots of the trends that were happening in Europe but he'd added to that a sense of sculpture or exuberance. This is a version of modernism that is partly recognisable in European terms but partly it does something completely new.

What Niemeyer's particularly famous for is doing very bold things with concrete. Concrete is his material because of its plastic qualities. And also, the fact that concrete's a material that needs a lot of labour, but labour is Brazil is very cheap. Or at least it was then.

He loves to do pilotis, or columns, that may be tapered to a very very narrow point. He likes to do columns that appear to be upside down. He likes to do things that give you a sense of maybe roofs that are floating or doing something impossible.

He's become very influential. Architects like Zaha Hadid, maybe Daniel Liebskind, who've built some of the most spectacular buildings of the last twenty or thirty years, used Niemeyer as a reference point.

I think Niemeyer was very concerned with experience.The kinds of forms that he was producing, and the kind of things that he was saying, were not unlike the things that were said around Surrealism. And he certainly knew about Surrealism. He was in touch with many of the people in that movement in France at the time of it being produced. Some of his forms are like the things you would see in the painting of Joan Mirò, the great Catalan artist.

Niemeyer was very keen that we think of him as an artist. So, if you were to visit his studio when he was still alive, you would be taken to a desk and you would meet him, and he would be somebody who would just sketch a few lines and then he would that say "Oh, I'm going to give this to my assistants now and they'll turn it into a building". So there was a sense that at a fundamental level he regarded what he was doing as art and then the practical dimensions to the buildings, somebody else could look after that. It was a bit of an act. He was a very skilled technician and he knew about engineering, but he wanted us to believe that he was an artist. And certainly, you know, everything that we know the buildings suggests somebody whose interests were very much in form rather than the functions of the buildings.

And there is a number of Niemeyer's buildings which are criticised in those terms. The ministry buildings, housing the civil service were built with so much glazing in a city that has some of the highest levels of sunshine in the world, they were basically uninhabitable at certain times of the day.

With the cathedral, he designed it as a mostly a glazed structure. You enter the cathedral by going down into the ground. Some people said that this was a joke, that you ended up going into this hot, glazed structure by going underneath the street level, so you were descending into hell. I don't know whether that's right or not but it's an amazing piece of sculpture. Niemeyer was an Atheist. He wasn't a believer at all. He was a very active member of the Brazilian Communist Party, so who knows if this uncomfortable effect was intentional.

In all of his work, he's thinking of the viewer having an experience that that takes them out of the everyday world, that kind of shocks them. He often used that word. He wanted to shock and surprise visitors. He wanted to take them out of the ordinary world, to take them somewhere else, to think, you know, "I've never seen something like that before". The character of Brasilia that people often remark on is the way that it looks like it's come from another planet. That was exactly what Niemeyer was after.