Brutal blueprints

On the architecture of Brasilia

by Anthony Daniels

When I was about ten years old, I used to design cities. It was very easy, and I was surprised that everyone before me had made such a hash of it. I could conclude only that the world had hitherto been populated by fools. At the very center of the city was the parliament building, which was like St. Peter’s but on a bigger and grander scale. Round it ran an eight-lane circular road, from which radiated, symmetrically, six large avenues. How the deputies to the parliament were supposed to reach it—dodge between the traffic, I suppose—was not a question with which I concerned myself. I was designing cities and buildings, not human convenience. Along the avenues were situated the institutions that I then considered essential for cities: the natural history museum, the art gallery, the royal palace. Everything was on a grand scale, and no mess of the kind created by commercial or other inessential establishments was permitted or planned for.

Brasilia was being built while I designed my cities, though in a different architectural vocabulary: one of reinforced concrete rather than marbled neoclassical façades. From the point of view of urban design and planning, however, it was not much of an advance over mine, but, unlike my designs, it was put into practice.

The first thing to say about Brasilia is that it is an astonishing achievement or feat, and this is so whether you think it good or bad or somewhere in between the two. Where nothing but a remote, hot, and scrubby plain existed just over half a century ago, there now stands a functioning city of over three million people. This is enough to excite wonderment.

What perhaps is even more astonishing is that Brasilia was up and running within less than four years of the first foundation being laid. The dream of moving the capital from the coast to the interior was almost as old as Brazil itself, and, indeed, such a move had long been a constitutional requirement, if only a dead-letter one. The idea was both economic and strategic: the move would simultaneously develop the interior and protect the country from foreign occupation.

It was President Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira, a Parisian-trained former urologist, who finally ordered Brasilia’s construction. According to the story, a man asked Kubitschek at a pre-election meeting whether, if elected, he would comply with the constitutional requirement that the capital be moved, and he said that he would. Whether for reasons of probity not universal among politicians, or for more pragmatic reasons, Kubitschek kept to his undertaking, but made it a condition of doing so that the new capital be completed within his presidential mandate. As with many, perhaps most, or even all grand schemes, the economic cost was not taken into account: Kubitschek was, in effect, Brazil’s Peter the Great, but without the cruelty or indifference to human life. Unfortunately, he was also without the taste.

This difference, no doubt, had more to do with the artistic Zeitgeist than with the individual qualities of the two men. Kubitschek has a mausoleum in Brasilia. His body is preserved in a stone sarcophagus in a dimly lit rotunda, complete with a museum of memorabilia, including his white-tie evening dress and foreign decorations. The whole thing is oddly Soviet for a country as seemingly unsovietizable as Brazil; it is like a hybrid of Lenin’s tomb and the “proofs of love” museum in Bucharest, devoted to the gifts that Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu received from around the world, such as carved coconut shell cups or bowls from their fervent admirers in Samoa.

In the mausoleum is a photograph of Belo Horizonte, where Kubitschek had been mayor in 1940. It was clearly a very pleasant place, architecturally speaking, a European city with tree-lined boulevards along which it would be pleasant to spend a day going from café to café. Everything was on a human scale, but, in a sense, it was undistinguished, because no architect had thought to build with a view to making Belo Horizonte completely different from anywhere else. Nothing in the picture said, “This is Belo Horizonte, and nowhere else.”

The change in taste, manifested by the construction of Brasilia fewer than twenty years later, is astonishing and represents a revolution more profound than many a political one. It was, of course, a revolution from above and not from below, and a largely insincere one at that. Taking a helicopter ride over Brasilia as I did, I could not help but notice how, in the wealthiest suburbs of the city, the rich hastened to build themselves neo-colonial residences (not always in the best of taste), and almost never in the high-modernist style. What part economic and social necessity played in the revolution may be disputed, but the change in taste was certainly in accord with the mandarin architectural doctrines in vogue at the time.

The three greatest figures in the construction of Brasilia were the urbanist Lucio Costa, the architect Oscar Niemeyer, and the landscape gardener Burle Marx. The work of the latter, who knew the flora of every region of Brazil, and created the formal gardens both inside and outside many of the main buildings of the city, was of great beauty and elegance. Unfortunately, his talent and taste were often wasted because of the brutalism of the others.

Costa and Niemeyer were both admiring followers of Le Corbusier and Communists—hence their inhuman aesthetic. Niemeyer, still alive at 103, is by all accounts a financially disinterested man (though no one ever suggested that Lenin, Stalin, or even Hitler were in it for the money—they were disinterested monsters), but it surely takes considerable stupidity, lack of moral imagination, or an egotism more profound than that of the most voracious Wall Street banker to proclaim yourself a Communist after all the human disaster that the doctrine wrought in the past century. Indeed, one pronouncement of Niemeyer captures not only this egotism, but encapsulates much of the egotistical sickness of many modern artists and architects: “Whoever goes to Brasilia may like its palaces or not, but he cannot say that he has seen anything like it before.” The same would be true, of course, if Brasilia had been built of refrigerated butter, but the originality of Brasilia is not the question.

The sheer incompetence of Costa as a city planner, at least from the point of view of all previously existent urbanized humanity, staggers belief. But of course, one’s assessment of a man’s competence depends upon what one believes him to be trying to do. I learned this hard lesson in Tanzania, where the President Julius Nyerere (currently undergoing preparations for canonization) had reduced the country by his policies to unprecedented levels of beggary, while speaking continually of the need for economic development. From this, I naively concluded that he was grossly incompetent, but once I assumed that his goal was to remain in supreme power for twenty-five years without much in the way of opposition, the scales fell from my eyes. He was, indeed, supremely competent.

What, then, did Costa do (let us forget for a moment his intentions)? He laid out a city according to the conceptions of Le Corbusier: embassies here, hotels there, entertainment facilities yet somewhere else—every quarter functionalized, disconnected by large open spaces, and not one within reach of the others except by motorized transport. Nor was shade provided for such eccentrics as might nevertheless like to walk or cycle: they were to be discouraged by the prospect of sun-stroke and heat exhaustion—the temperature often rising to above 100 degrees in the broiling sun (the same problem, incidentally, exists in Le Corbusier’s Indian city of Chandigarh, suggesting, to use a phrase beloved of Marxists, that this is no coincidence).

The few concrete seats available—for example, those in the Square of the Three Powers—should be such as to give potential loiterers backache within five minutes or sores on the buttocks, and one cannot help but recall the Marquis de Custine’s prophetic remark about the open spaces of St. Petersburg, that a crowd that gathered in them would be a revolution. The possibility of a crowd spontaneously gathering in Brasilia has been completely avoided, however; it is a city for coups rather than for revolutions. Perhaps this was one of the underlying reasons for its design, just as Haussmann’s boulevards were designed to give soldiers a good aim at the revolutionary mob.

Man in Brasilia is essentially an insect, a kind of ant, or perhaps rather a noxious bacterium. There is a plan afoot to ensure that, before the football World Cup is held there in 2014, cars in the central area do not park on the street, but underground: parked cars on the street being a sign of human spontaneity and tendency to chaos. As Le Corbusier once exclaimed in print, “The plan, the plan is everything! The plan must rule.” What is Man, let alone a man, compared with the kind of city that I drew when I was ten?

As for the buildings themselves, justice requires that I mention that a small handful of them are impressive, and that one of them, the Itamaray Palace (the Foreign Ministry) is actually beautiful, surely one of the best buildings of the second half of the twentieth century. Almost uniquely, it is suited to its climate, its grand upper story open to air that is never cold. Elegantly proportioned, and with the only concrete I have seen anywhere that is finely worked and does not look brutal, it stands in a lovely water-garden. The entrance hall, clad in white stone, with a graceful curved stairway in the same stone, is coolly—one might almost say antiseptically—elegant.

Is an architect, like a writer, to be judged by his best work? It is no more likely, after all, that an architect could build a great building by chance than that a writer could write a great novel by chance. Both require talent. But the analogy is not quite exact, if for no other reason than that a bad building is not to be cast aside as easily as a bad book. Bad architecture is inescapable as bad books are not. Bad buildings do not moulder away in private on the shelves of libraries: they disfigure whole cities. And the fact is that when Niemeyer is bad, as he is most of the time, he is very bad indeed.

His long military parade of rectangular glass ministry buildings along the central axis of the city is an architectural celebration of heartless bureaucratic power. Glass boxes are singularly ill-adapted to a hot climate in which the sun shines most of the time, there being few less pleasant sensations than that of sunshine striking the clothed flesh after having passed through glass. Niemeyer’s solution to the technical problem of his own creation was Le Corbusier’s hideous brises soleil, adjustable metal slats to divert the rays, that soon give the buildings a slum-like appearance. And indeed, when one looks through the glass side of the building that does not need brises soleil, this impression is strengthened by the singular messiness of what one can see: various curtain-type arrangements, a random assortment of furniture and equipment, in short the aesthetic impression of a housing project in a bad part of Chicago.

As usual, the functionalism is not functional, and the eschewal of ornamentation, half-puritanical and half-dictated by an aesthetic ideology, is defeated by human need. Some of the palaces, for example of the Supreme Court, look elegant in the floodlight at night (they are among Niemeyer’s better work), but when approached in the light of day give quite another impression. The concrete of the futuristic framework has deteriorated, as one might expect; the glass box within the spidery veranda is a mess precisely because it contains people who have to work, with all their need for chairs, tables, and other accoutrements. The glass box was clearly imagined without all this: its perfection was as abstract as, say, a scheme for the collectivization of agriculture.

At its worst, Niemeyer’s architecture is almost comically bad: that is, it would be funny if it were not so permanent and had not been declared part of the world heritage by UNESCO. The National Theater, for example, is a truncated pyramid of brown concrete whose ugliness is not of this world. If Hell needed an architect, Niemeyer would be in with a chance. Asked to guess from the exterior and interior of the building what it was, I think I would hazard that it was a nuclear fallout shelter before a theater. The corridors resemble, on a smaller scale, those of the war tunnels that the Nazis built in the side of a hill in occupied Jersey. The team of Costa and Niemeyer managed to combine the unpleasant consequences of gigantism with those of Pit-and-the-Pendulum claustrophobia: no mean feat, though not one I should wish to see reproduced.

All this said, honesty compels me to record a fact that induced in me a state of disagreeable cognitive dissonance. I heard from several people that the population of Brasilia, half of which was now born there, liked living in the city very much, and I had no reason to disbelieve them. My first thought was that this must be because, for all the city’s manifest aesthetic faults, life there is comparatively easy and convenient by comparison with other Brazilian cities, with their combination of permanently gridlocked traffic and high rates of crime. But crime is hardly unknown in Brasilia; indeed, the Corbusian apartment blocks, built on stilts so that the ground floors are open spaces, could have been designed to make life easy for the mugger and the rapist. The fact that other Brazilians who move to Brasilia dislike it intensely suggests that the sheer animal convenience of living in a modern city (much of which, incidentally, departs from the original design and is composed of glass towers that could be anywhere), which is as great for them as for the natives of the place, cannot explain the latter’s liking for it. And this is a very uncomfortable thought, for it makes architects what Niemeyer’s admired Stalin thought writers were or should be: engineers of the soul.