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A Day in BrasiliaAuthor(s): Carlos BrillembourgSource: BOMB, No. 67 (Spring, 1999), pp. 20-21Published by: New Art PublicationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40426084 .

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mawmmmmm.

^3>^POSITIONSA Day In BrasiliaIn 1956 - shortly fter his inaugurationand before launchingthe com-petitionfor the new capital- Juscelino Kubitchek de Oliveira,presidentof Brazil, asked his friendOscar Niemeyer o design and beginconstruction on the futurepresidential palace just outside themain axis of the future capital: the sublime Palace of theDawn. In this way, Brasilia, the onlyworld capital built duringthe 20th century,was born.When Yuri Gagarin,Soviet cosmonaut and the firstman in

The center s empty. t was Ludwig Mies Van der Rone's concept of"universalspace" that inspired Niemeyer. his emptiness n Brasilia is the

HHHHHHHHHSBB^BHH^^^HIHHIHhmhBhBIHIHIspace, arrived in Brasilia he said, XVI ^^^^jifeel s if stepped n the urface f ^^^tf^^^^^^^B!another planet." The low-lying ^^^^^^^^^^IBHIH^Hcloudscape, the stronghorizontality |VISIH|^^|HH||J^H|HIofthe grassyplains are brokenonly IJbBIHH^^^^^^BIIHIIIIby a sporadic sprinklingf trees f_^^^^^H^^HnHH|H|and lakes. You feel you're on the j^H9^^^|^|^^B^^^^H||dome of the earth. Brasilia is the |^K^^^^^^H|^^^H|only modern city founded on the ^^^Hj^^^^^^^^^^^^^Hmost orthodox precepts of modern l^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^larchitecture as dictated by Le |^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^|Corbusier. Now that Brasilia is ^^^^^^^^^HB^R^^^^Ialmost 50 years old,we can look at ^^^^^^^^^IHB^BB^^^Iit as theperfectrcheological ui- ^^^^^^^^^^^HHEX^^^Iturai object of our century. he city KKgnHicontains all the Utopian aspira-tions,as well as the supreme failures of this socialist experiment.Aboveall, in the central spine of the ministry ffices, his hauntingly therealvisionevocative of hidden and secret symbolsremains intact.

clearest example of howthe desire for a utabularasa" (not as in a blankslate, but as accordingtothe Sanskrit, a plane ofessence) as the foundationfor a new architecturecould onlyexist on paper.Here in Brasilia,this ideais moved forward into areal space and a real city.Its infinite vista- firstseen in Vaux le Vicompteand then perfected inVersailles is superim-posed on the universal ndabstract space of Mies.The result s an empty itybuilton a ^higherplane"fromwhichwe feel hatweare always lookingat thehorizon. Within this hori-zontality,he monumentalgovernmentuildings,ymbolic f a newcountry,re modest nterruptionsnthispowerful,lmostextraterrestrial,andscape.The infinite xpanse of the landscape, and the fluid movement

BOMB SPRING 992 O

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through its highways overpasses without traffic lights is inter-rupted bythe repetitive lignmentof identical governmenthigh-riseslabs reminiscent f Ludwig Hilberseimer's deal cityprojects. Here Iam also reminded of Teotihuacn, mixed up with Leonidov's DomNarkomtjazjprom1933 project on Moscow's Red Square. A monu-mental axis with open space in the center frames a large elevatedplatform;then we find a ten-meter separation between the officeslabs, orientedeast-west inalignmentwith the sun. Here,elevated onthe groundplane, are two half spheres.One is occupied bythe senateand the other, nverted nd much larger, s occupied bythe Chamberof Deputies.The extreme contrast between Rio de Janeiroand Brasilia is notfortuitous. n designing citythat looks like an airplane from bove,Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyerused the intersection f two axes asthe basis for being unbounded by physical constraints,capable ofexpanding ndlessly nto thathorizon.Brasilia,which was designedfor

perhaps the onlyoriginal 20th-centuryAmericanworkthat surpassesits European antecedents, pointing hewayto another vision of archi-tecture rooted in a very American conception of modernityandrealized bythe adaptation of its Utopianvision to the benevolence of

a maximumof700,000 inhabitants, as more than1.5 million nhab-itants oday and seems to be growing apidlywiththe incorporation fsatellitecities on itsperiphery.he result s a populationthat is spreadout and dependenton the automobile to such an extent hatplans havebeen drawnup for mass transit rail system o alleviate the enormoussurface traffic eneratedbythis obsolete urban strategy.JuscelinoKubitschek aid at the openingceremony, [Brasilia is]more than a mere aesthetic trend, nd above all more than the pro-jection into our culture of a universal movement, solution whichtakes carefully into account climate and scenery,perhaps the mostoriginaland precise expressionof the creative intelligence f modernBrazil/7 believe that Brasilia, in its planningand as realized in itsbuildingsdesigned byOscar Niemeyer,s an originalwork of art. It is

its climate inthe plains of central Brazil.Today the intelligencethat Juscelino Kubitschek citeshas been encoded in the cryptic spatial relationship ofBrasilia's abstract monuments. hese mysterious nd secretreadingsof the cityhave givenrise to numerous ults devotedto lookingat Brasilia as a kind of "psychic uplink"to outer^^M space. Brasilia is seen by these groups as a 20th-century^^^3 Stonehenge that not onlyfunctions n alignmentto the sun^^H and stars, but provides clues to the most obscure set of^^H geometriesthat originate n pharaonic Egypt.^^K Brasilia was built by transportingall the material by^^H airplane in1957, and completed bythe time Kubitschek eft^^H office n 1961. First populated by reluctantdiplomats andIHH governmentbureaucrats, this Instant Metropolis has some-thing in common with other world capitals that came intoexistence inthe same way: WashingtonD.C., Canberra,Australia andVijagannagara, India built bythe Hindu Empire inthe 14th century.Theyall express the desire to dominate a large territory hrough hestrategic placement of monuments over a spacious, natural context;it is the coexistence of the landscape as redefinedbythe monumentsthat communicates the sense of powerthat is the essence, or rasa, ofthe city.

CARLOSBRILLEMBOURG

BOMB SPRINT, QQ2 I

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