Reimagining Brasilia’s modernism

Sixty-one years ago, Brasília emerged from Brazil’s hinterland. Developed on an empty savanna between 1956 and 1960, the city that replaced Rio de Janeiro as the country’s capital was a joint endeavor between urban planner Lúcio Costa and architect Oscar Niemeyer. With its winged shape, Brasília became a powerful symbol, because it represents one of the purest incarnations of the hopes, splendor, and ingenuousness of twentieth-century architecture. But it takes only a few hours here to see that this utopian metropolis – a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987 – is plagued by urban-planning defects.

The most obvious problem is a series of design choices that privilege motorists. The power of the automobile is cemented into Brasília’s principal axis, the 15-kilometer (9.3 miles) Eixo Monumental. Driving it – through green fields and past mighty monuments – is thrilling, but walking it is stymied by stretches of missing sidewalk. The urban landscape is seemingly tailored for spectacular selfies, rather than for moving one’s legs. While municipalities across the world are today competing to make their streets safer for pedestrians and bicyclists, Brasília’s rumbling engines and screeching tires are a stark reminder of how many twentieth-century urban designers imagined a future inextricably linked to the car. Now we must struggle to overcome the visions they paved. In Brasília, that vision is of a life that can run only through the city’s automotive arteries. Buildings are located large distances apart, scattered along wide esplanades. Niemeyer’s masterpieces console us with their curving shapes. These are the curves, he wrote, that “we find in mountains, in the waves of the sea, in the body of the woman we love.” But the absence of a traditional urban setup leaves Brasília socially poorer. There is a profound lack of public spaces – the existing ones look more like leftovers – and the streets are bereft of their historical significance as places of encounter and dialogue. They exist here only as a crude parody of true urban infrastructure. Another of Brasília’s drawbacks is its rigid functional division. This affects the city’s planning even more. During one of my first visits, I was admiring Niemeyer’s cathedral, which blossoms with its concrete pistils on the Esplanada dos Ministérios, when a young local engineer in our delegation made a telling quip: “Do you know what really doesn’t work in this city? The espresso coffee district is far from the sugar district.”

His joke revealed one of the fundamental limitations of both Costa’s Plano Piloto design and modernist urban-planning principles in general: a dogmatic zoning strategy that stifles possibilities for organic urban growth. In Brasília, you might well find yourself in a mono-functional neighborhood, perhaps consisting almost entirely of dull, tiresome hotels. In other words, far from embracing complexity, Brazil’s capital rejects it, as if the city could be reduced to a formula. The mathematician and architect Christopher Alexander famously diagnosed this mistake a half-century ago in A City is Not a Tree. A metropolis cannot obey predefined hierarchies and orders, like those of a tree diagram, but should instead resemble a network of interconnected elements. By attempting to reduce urban complexity, Brasília’s designers stunted the spontaneity that is one of the most stimulating features of urban experience. Fortunately, Brasília is not a lost city. The more one gets to know its inhabitants, the more one understands how, over time, life always manages to take over. For example, pousadas – small, family-run hotels – have popped up everywhere to take tourists out of the city’s traditional hotel zones. Such “urban acupuncture” initiatives bring a pinprick of pleasant chaos to Brasília’s rigid modernist design. This pattern of life prevailing – or at least surviving – in the face of top-down impositions is a central theme of Latin American history, especially among the indigenous people who have resisted social and cultural oblivion since European conquerors arrived five centuries ago. One priority for urban designers today should be to accelerate this dynamic. There are many ways to do it, and some are relatively straightforward. Widening sidewalks and bike paths, for example, can substantially alter the way we enjoy the city. In the medium term, new neighborhoods can be created in Brasília that preserve the basic Plano Piloto layout, while promoting a greater mix of functions and more complexity. Brasília’s design limitations offer a crucial lesson for many other cities. By resisting the temptation to fill every square inch of space on their paper and instead leaving as many blank areas as possible, architects and urban planners can allow people and changing times to co-create a city as spontaneous as life. The writer Umberto Eco called this notion “the open work,” and contrasted it with fixed blueprints imposed from above. Today, we can borrow from computer science and insist that the “open work” become open source, inviting contributions from different hands and offering rewards to even more. On my most recent departure from Brasília, a phrase of Le Corbusier’s came to mind. The great Swiss-French architect, one of the most influential of the twentieth century, helped develop the modernist urban-planning principles that gave birth to Brasília. But in one of his last interviews, a journalist asked him about some of his projects that had failed to respond to a multiplicity of social demands, his answer was as revealing as it was magnanimous. “You know,” he said, “it is life that is always right, and the architect who is wrong.”