SPOTLIGHT ON WORLD ANNIVERSARIES
APR 21, 1960 ● 50 YEARS
Brasília was established as the capital of the federative republic of Brazil on this date. A controversial wonder of urban planning and an exemplar of modernist architecture, the purpose-built city in the interior of Brazil replaced Rio de Janeiro as the country’s capital.
Akin to Washington, DC, in the US, Brasília is situated in the nation’s Federal District, autonomous from Brazil’s 26 states. It is a preplanned metropolis, conceived, commissioned and constructed in just 41 months under the direction of populist president Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira, elected in 1956 with the progressive campaign motto “50 years in five.” Part of his accelerated development plan was to honor a colonial charter and relocate the capital city from the heavily populated coast to the undeveloped interior of the country. He imagined Brasília as a futuristic urban utopia, famously calling it “a new dawn in the history of Brazil.” He commissioned internationally renowned modernist architect Oscar Niemeyer to head the project, and before 1956 ended, ground was broken in a barren, semiarid plateau in the central-west region of Brazil, and the Paranoa River was dammed to form a lake 50 miles in diameter to serve as the city’s reservoir. Itinerant workers called candangos migrated by the thousands from the poor north and northeast regions of Brazil to take jobs building the connecting highways (not railways, notably) and constructing architect Niemeyer’s patented columnar and curvaceous municipal monuments.
In 1957, architect Lúcio Costa was named Brasília’s urban planner with what was dubbed his Pilot Plan. He developed the city sight-unseen for fear that his purist designs would be influenced by the reality of the environment. Viewed from above, Costa’s layout is said to resemble a butterfly, a dragonfly, a bird or, most commonly, an airplane. Three Powers Square (comprising the government buildings) makes up the “cockpit” while uniform six-story superquadras (residential blocks and commercial districts) fill out the two “wings.” The long “fuselage” is defined by the Esplanada dos Ministérios, a massive center-city green space bounded on two sides by eight-lane avenues called the Monumental Axis. Conceived in the automobile age, Brasília’s roads began as a free-flowing system of thoroughfares, cloverleafs and streets that precluded the need for traffic lights and included few sidewalks and no crosswalks.
In 1958, the president’s official residence—the modernist marble and glass Palace of the Dawn—was dedicated while the city was still under construction. President Kubitschek officially opened Brasília on April 21, 1960. Its cityscape is defined by Niemeyer’s futuristic white monuments, constructed mainly of reinforced concrete and glass, including the Palace of the Plateau presidential offices, the Supreme Court and the twin towers and two adjacent bowls—one upright and one inverted—of the National Congress. The architect’s hyperboloid, blue glass-ceilinged Cathedral of Brasília was completed in 1970.
Brasília was initially conceived as an egalitarian, self-contained administrative hub to house the families of politicians, dignitaries, embassy workers and civil servants. However, the working class candangos remained in the region and formed their own villages, which have since come to be known as the satellite cities of Brasília. The population of the metropolitan area far exceeds original expectations, and the city has deviated from some of Costa’s Pilot Plan with the installation of traffic lights and real estate development outside of the original city borders.
Brasília was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987 for its “historical and cultural heritage of humanity.” However, detractors criticize Costa’s vast, treeless paved plazas and the city’s virtual inaccessibility for pedestrians. Visiting with Jean-Paul Sartre in 1963, Simone de Beauvoir derided Brasília, asking, “What possible interest could there be in wandering about? The street, that meeting ground of passersby, of stores and houses, of vehicles and pedestrians does not exist in Brasília and never will.”
Brasília is not officially classified as a city per se but rather as an administrative region of the 2,235-square-mile Federal District. As of 2009, Brasília proper housed just short of 200,000 people (substantially fewer on weekends when the politicians leave en masse for their homes in the coastal regions). Factoring in the 18 satellite cities in the Federal District, the population currently exceeds 2.5 million.
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