A Plan[e] for the New Capital

I was born and raised in the city of Sao Paulo in Brazil. From middle-school history classes, I remember learning about our country’s continental size and its strategies to advance as a developed country through the 20^th century.

Although I could not fully understand that concept of development, I remember my family’s contagious excitement and pride of having a new Capital. I wonder if my interest in the building environment has flourished from that enthusiasm.

Because of the population density between Rio and Sao Paulo, Brazil wanted to move the Capital from Rio to a central location as a strategy to bring people to occupy other parts of the country. In the 1950s, President Juscelino Kubitschek ordered the construction of Brasilia, which would host all three branches of the federal government: Executive, Legislative and Judicial.

Brasilia was planned and developed by two architects: Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, and landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx. Lucio Costa was the architect who proposed an axial organization where a main North-to-South road would be flanked by city blocks. This plan, as many drawn around the world around the same time, responded to the organization of cities around modes of transportation, especially cars. The city original configuration is frequently compared to the shape of an airplane.

I was especially captivated by Niemeyer explorations of reinforced concrete. Among his main contributions to the design of the city, there are:

The Residence of the President: Palacio da Alvorada

The National Congress of Brazil

Cathedral of Brasilia

The interior of Brasilia Cathedral.

I did not have the chance to visit the city until my late teens, but it felt just like the perfect time. As a junior student in a Civil Engineering undergrad program in Sao Paulo State University, I was able to appreciate the ground-up construction of a whole city, its planning, and the development of a design language that defined Modernism in Brazilian architecture. This past April, Brasilia celebrated its 56^th anniversary and it is the 4th most populous city in Brazil.

This replica of Michelangelo’s Pieta inside Brasilia’s Cathedral was the first one produced by the Vatican Museum to replicate the proportions of its original by millimeters.

– Andy