1 s2.0 S0305900607000177 Main

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PROGRESS
IN PLANNING
Progress in Planning 67 (2007) 301366
www.elsevier.com/locate/pplann
Review
Bras lia after Bras lia
Richard J. Williams
School of Art, Culture and Environment, University of Edinburgh, 20 Chambers Street,
Edinburgh EH1 1JZ, UK
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
1.1. Introduction
The Brazilian capital Bras lia was masterplanned by Lucio Costa and inaugurated
with much fanfare on 21 April 1960. It was briey celebrated internationally: the
French Minister of Culture called it the capital of hope, Fidel Castro praised it as a
symbol of youth, and the Pope gave a special mass. The images of the city at the time
of its inauguration, by the photographers Marcel Gautherot and Rene Burri, are
exceptionally well-known, among the most famous photographs of modernist
architecture anywhere (Figs. 12). The city now has protected status, having been
declared a World Heritage Site by the United Nations Educational, Scientic and
Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1987. UNESCO status protects, broadly
speaking, the city portrayed in the terms of those classic photographs of the Pilot
Plan. Bras lia is, however, now a much larger and more complex object than the city
represented in those images. As several commentators have noted, the Pilot Plan is
now only a small part of a vast metropolitan region centred on the once peripheral
settlement of Taguatinga (Wright and Turkienicz, 1988, p. 364; Holanda, 2002). And
its status within that region is distinctly odd: for one recent commentator, it has
become a museum of the avant-garde, barely urban or even alive (Gorelik, 2005).
That is one change since 1960. Another, less dramatic, but no less signicant, is its
discursive status within the discipline of architecture, and its cognate elds of
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302 R.J. Williams / Progress in Planning 67 (2007) 301366
urbanism and planning. Up until 1960, Brazilian modernist architecture was well
regarded internationally. In fact, during the period 19301960, Brazil might be said
to have been the world capital of modernism: nowhere else was modernist
architecture so enthusiastically adopted as a national style, and nowhere else were
the limits of architectural modernism tested with such vigour. Le Corbusiers well-
documented visits to Brazil in 1929 and 1936 not only helped advance his own ideas
in Brazil, but the visits powerfully informed his own practice (Frampton, 2001,
pp. 113115). Elsewhere, buildings in the Brazilian idiom sprang up all over the
world, the United Nations headquarters in New York being perhaps the greatest
example (Wallace K. Harrison with an international design team including Oscar
Niemeyer, 19471953). Brazils status was largely irreproachable until 1960. After
1960, for a variety of reasons, there was a profound and abrupt disengagement.
Fig. 1. Oscar Niemeyer, National Congress, Bras lia and visitors, 1960. Photograph by Rene Burri.
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R.J. Williams / Progress in Planning 67 (2007) 301366 303
Fig. 2. Oscar Niemeyer, Ministry Building, Bras lia, 1960. Photograph by Rene Burri.
Brazil and Bras lia arguably vanished from international architectural discourse.
Bras lia, where it appeared at all, became an object of derision, or amusement at
best. For Kenneth Frampton, an architectural historian sympathetic to the rst
owerings of Brazilian modernism, the city signies the moment at which the
modern project simply failed, a failure with global consequences, whose repercus-
sions are still being felt today (Frampton, 1992, p. 256). For the British planner
Colin Buchanan reiterating an apocryphal remark of Jean Paul Sartres Bras lia
was The Moons Backside (Buchanan, 1967) (Fig. 3). Occasional articles on the city
would appear through the 1970s and 1980s, but written in the spirit of a Victorian
explorer bringing back news from a dark continent (for example, Garnett, 1988). The
major architectural work on the city after 1960, James Holstons The Modernist City
of which more in due course ts this pattern. A work of anthropology more than
architectural history, it presented the city as an exotic and highly irrational place in
which civilized urban life was marked by its absence (Holston, 1989).
If Bras lia disappeared during the 1970s and 1980s, there has lately been a urry of
interest in it again. Niemeyer, the citys chief architect was awarded the RIBA Gold
Medal in 1999. There have been scholarly books on the city and numerous articles.
The citys reputation has partly revived. It has even become a major tourist
attraction for design-conscious travellers, no longer an object of embarrassment,
but of keen interest and curiosity (see Cleary et al., 2003, pp. 475497). Yet the
revival of interest has not been properly subjected to analysis. Neither has the
ongoing research on the city in Brazil been much analysed, a good deal of which is
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Fig. 3. Colin Buchanan, The Moons Backside. RIBA Journal, April 1967.
highly sophisticated, yet makes few of the assumptions about quality or history that
foreign commentators do. This is a good moment to look at the historiography of
Bras lia, to explore what it has meant for two generations of investigators, and how
those meanings have changed over time. As we shall see, Bras lias disappearance
needs to be qualied: its importance as an object of sociological or anthropological
interest continued through the 1970s and 1980s. But its effective disappearance from
the discursive eld that gave rise to it in the rst place architecture is by any
standards signicant.
This paper has three parts. The rst surveys the changing critical status of the city
from 1960 to the present, in the belief that what people say about the city is at least
as important as its built form. The second considers the evolution of the Pilot Plan
since 1960. The nal part of the paper meanwhile examines the chief anxiety about
the post-1960 city, namely the growth and consolidation of the city beyond the Pilot
Plan. This city was once periphery, and the anxieties about its growth echo those
about the sprawl of Paris in the 19th century, or London in the 20th. Its scale and
complexity, however, now challenge the centre-periphery paradigm, if not yet
comprehensively.
The paper is motivated by two important assumptions: rstly that the Pilot Plan is
increasingly an anachronism, although a far better preserved, and far more
comfortable one than is usually realized; secondly, that the post-1960 Bras lia has,
whatever happens to the Pilot Plan, a vital place in an increasingly important
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economy. There is every reason to suppose that it will be one of Brazils, and by
extension South Americas, more important cities in the 21st century. Its rate of
population growth has been high, 4.5% per year since 1970, the third highest in
Brazil (Da Mata et al., 2005, p. 7). Its per capita income is among the highest of any
of Brazils large conurbations. Its strengths government, IT, education and retail
are areas of growth in the contemporary, post-industrial economy. It may not yet be
a global city in Saskia Sassens denition, but it increasingly has the characteristics of
one; it is well networked, it has spaces of work and leisure that could be anywhere,
and it has concentrations of unusual wealth and poverty in close proximity to each
other (Sassen, 2000, pp. 3341). It therefore merits discussion, not as a local
curiosity, but as a city that belongs in a global discourse about cities.
However, much of the recent attention given to Brazil and Bras lia in Anglophone
discourse remains xated on the moment of inauguration, and insists on the citys
eccentricity. In this paper, by contrast, I reinsert Bras lia into a global discourse
about cities and city life, and to do that we need to shift our attention away from the
Pilot Plan, and the early images of it, however, fascinating. As the Brazilian
architectural critic Ruth Verde Zein has stated, Bras lias value lies precisely in its
status as a prototype however, unintended for the most dynamic forms of
contemporary urbanization. It is not an eccentric place, a weird anachronism, but a
contemporary city that is much more like other contemporary cities than is generally
supposed. Not only that, but it is more like, or less unlike, key historical European
cities like Barcelona than is often thought. It was in Bras lia, she argues, that key
tendencies in contemporary development were rehearsed: here globalization and
the megalopolis came into being, and as a result we should study Brasilia a lot and
not keep on saying that its a failure (Brillemboug, 2004, p. 159).
1.2. Approaches and methods
The paper as a whole engages with debates in a range of academic and

professional discourses art history, architecture, anthropology, sociology, history,
planning but stands outside all of them. My interest in Bras lia has certain limits.
I am interested primarily in Bras lia as a discursive object, as a problematic within
certain academic and professional discourses. I am very interested in visual images of
it, especially those marshalled in support of an argument about it, whether positive
or negative. I am less concerned with discussions of individual buildings, except
when they illuminate an argument about the city. I generally avoid value judgements
about architecture here. To some readers, this paper will appear to exist on a at
critical plane in which the shabby, decaying store fronts along the W3 avenue have as
much value as the presidential palace, or in which the developer-modern of the
suburb of Aguas Claras is as important as the original modernism of 108 South.
I take seriously the few recent interventions in the Pilot Plan, such as the much
criticized postmodern mall, Bras lia Shopping. I am not much interested here in the
personalities of the key gures involved in Bras lias construction, Oscar Niemeyer
and Lucio Costa. My understanding of the city is not as an essentially singly
authored work of art, but instead a multiply authored, dynamic process (Fig. 4).
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Within that process, I make little distinction between what might be termed
discursive, and actual, objects. I am interested primarily in what people say about a
place or a building, so that act of speech or writing, however seemingly ephemeral or
inaccurate, is taken as evidence if it appears to move the debate in a particular
direction. Likewise, in the third part of the paper, the advertising material put out by
developers is a source of signal importance. Crude and sometimes highly misleading,
this material is, as we shall see, vital in providing an image of the city under
development as opposed to frozen in time. It is often the only source we have, and has
the advantage of telling us something about the consumption of the city, of the
aspirations, fears and desires of its consumers. If all this appears somewhat
postmodern, so be it. If nothing else, there needs to be an alternative to the existing
literatures on Bras lia in English which tend to focus on the now historic architecture
of the Pilot Plan, at the expense of the rest of the city.
There is no single model as such for an analysis like this. For the importance of
images here, and the catholic use of them, I would cite a well-known work of art
history, T. J. Clarks The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his
Followers (Clark, 1985). I would also suggest, thinking of my projects essentially art
historical origins, that it has an ethics in relation to that discipline. Clarks project,
for example, paid great attention to the representation of the urban periphery and its
problems, as a means of both making a critique of entrenched views about
Impressionism, and relating the discipline of art history to the contemporary urban
world. As he argues, the edgy, formless world of the Parisien banlieue was an
unconscious blueprint for all subsequent urban development in the western world
(Clark, 1985, p. 146). This is a smaller-scale project, but the questions it addresses are
of a similar kind. Art historys traditional assumptions that visual images matter,
and cannot simply be reduced to text, or illustrations of texts are more often
deployed with regard to more stable and canonical objects than those under
consideration here, but they might have something to offer in the image-rich
territory around Bras lia. By invoking art history here, I also refer to a historical
debate about the role of that discipline vis-a`-vis urbanism. As Arturo Almandoz has
described in an earlier article for Progress in Planning, in the historiography of
planning in Latin America, the discourse of planning is seen to move decisively away
from an essentially art historical aesthetic system (urbanismo), to one based on quasi-
scientic, rationalistic methods (planificacion) (Almandoz, 2006, pp. 8384). This
process happened much earlier in the Anglophone world, and in that world it largely
removed an object like Bras lia from the purview of art history. Part of the purpose
of this paper is to put it back, and show how through the use of the analysis of
images and discourses around the city that is to say, to say the concerns of
contemporary art history an alternative, and I hope, useful, view of the city can be
arrived at.
That is one methodological aim. The need for an alternative approach is made
clear by the limited concept on the city in the existing literatures. On the one hand,
the architectural-critical literature generally refuses to consider anything beyond the
Pilot Plan, and only then as a form of aberration. On the other, the much more
dominant sociological and anthropological literatures have often considered the city
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only in terms of its margins. Such largely Marxist approaches are an important
counterweight to the aestheticizing approaches to the city one might nd elsewhere.
But they constitute a limit in urban representation. As John Dickenson has written,
Latin American cities have become only representable through their social and
economic periphery. Studies of the Latin American city have concentrated, he writes,
on one element of its form marginal housing; one social group the impoverished;
one segment of its function the tertiary refuge sector; and one (or possibly two)
elements of its history the present (and the future). The emphasis, he continues, is
with the city as a problem with its malfunctions and with one part of its space
and with the circumstances of the impoverished in urban places, not with the
places themselves. In consequence, however, we know little of the remainder of
the city its historic past; its bourgeois and elite society; its manufacturing,
commercial or producer services activities; or its mansions, apartment blocks,
CBDs or shoppings. Substantial elements of the urban experience (even if for
good reason) are largely ignored people, areas, activities and evolution
(Dickenson, 1994, p. 13).
To be fair, Dickensons view relates to a situation of the 1970s and 1980s in
relation to the Latin American city in general. But in respect of Bras lia, it is an
argument still worth making given the continuing prominence of literature from this
period. James Holstons The Modernist City from 1989 remains the most widely read
source in English, while in Brazil itself, it is work from this period (such as Aldo
Pavianis) that by one crude measure the stock in academic bookstores remains
the most widely available. The literature about Bras lia can therefore be said to be
traditionally polarized between an architectural-critical literature that entirely rejects
the post-1960 city, and an anthropologicalsociological one that can only see the city
in terms of its margins. In exploring the literature, and its lacunae, and then the
complex question of the margins, I hope to produce a different account. Following
Dickenson, I take seriously city spaces that have tended to be ignored in the past:
shopping malls and suburbs, ordinary commercial development. My approach
focuses neither wholly on the margins, nor on the architecture of the centre; it is
partially art historical in origins in the emphasis it places on images and their
interpretations, but it has moved some way from art historys canon (Fig. 5).
The paper has some limits, which should be briey sketched. The literature survey
in the rst part is wide-ranging, but is not, and does not try to be, comprehensive. It
is drawn from sources in three languages, primarily: English, French and
Portuguese, and not really more than four countries: England, the United States,
France and, of course, Brazil. The reason for this limit is partly pragmatic the line
simply had to be drawn somewhere. But it also has to do with the relationship
between these literatures. Given the importance of foreign cultures during the 20th
century, the international journals in architecture could be as important as the local
ones; in many ways they were more so (Andreoli and Forty, 2004, pp. 819). It is
clear that French journals, particularly LArchitecture dAujourdhui, were of signal
importance for the Brazilians, not least because it was here that Brazilian
architecture received special treatment (Lara, 2001, p. 8). In the heroic period of
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Brazilian modernism, there were special issues on Brazil in 1947 and 1952, extended
treatments of Bras lia in 1960 and 1962, and regular discussion of key Brazilian
buildings in between. French architects had long regarded Brazil as a neo-colony,
and they could do so with authority because of the Francophile character of the
Brazilian elite, at least in the rst half of the 20th century. When LArchitecture
dAujourdhui reported on Brazil, it was in many ways speaking to a Brazilian public
as much as a French one.
The key point is that we are dealing with an interrelated set of literatures and
discourses, in which ideas easily cross the linguistic boundaries between English,
French and Portuguese (albeit, of course, with trafc in particular directions at
particular times). My understanding of the literature at the time of writing is that
certain other languages for example German are less well represented in the
literature. So my exclusion of the literature in German (or Spanish, or Swedish, or
Finnish, or Italian) is not just pragmatism, but a function of the makeup of
international discourses around Bras lia. It is not that Bras lia is absent in the
architectural discourse in these languages, but that it is arguably not present in the
same way. English, French and Portuguese literatures constantly refer to each other;
they refer much less to literatures in those other languages.
There are some temporal limits to the paper too. My starting point is 1960,
because this is the point at which most architectural histories stop. Indeed it is widely
accepted in Brazil as much as outside as a point of rupture after which things
change, or become obscure (Zein, 2003, p. 45). My analysis in the rst part is
arranged more or less chronologically. But as a chronology, it is admittedly patchy.
I discuss little from the 1970s, for example, whereas the 1980s and the early 2000s are
rich decades. Such variations are to be expected as Bras lia moves out of, and then
into, view again. Finally, given the now widespread availability of literature on
Bras lia in English, I have not felt the need to reiterate the citys early history or
design principles. For an introduction to those things, the reader should consult rst
Holford (1957) which includes a translation of Lucio Costas 1957 submission to the
design competition. For straightforward histories of the city, Evenson (1973) and
Fraser (2000) are recommended.
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CHAPTER 2
Bras lia as text
2.1. Braslias disappearance
Any account of the critical status of Bras lia ought to begin with its effective
disappearance after 1960. Its disappearance can be qualied Bras lia does not so
much disappear, as move from one set of professional discourses to another but is
nevertheless widespread as an idea in local as much as international literatures (Lara,
2001, p. 8; Zein, 2003, p. 45). In Brazil, the capital has often been an object of
embarrassment, frequently ignored or repressed. In Alberto Xaviers monumental
anthology of key texts on Brazilian modernism, Depoimento de uma Gerac- ao
(Statement of a Generation), rst published in 1987, the capital is conspicuous by
its absence. In this anthology, one of the key research resources in the eld, the
capital appears in image, in the form of one of Marcel Gautherots photographs of
the National Congress under construction. The image is presented with no
commentary, and the capital is similarly absent from any of the texts, although its
principal authors, Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa are well represented and its
editor lived and worked in the capital in the early 1970s (Xavier, 2003, pp. 328329;
Serapiao, 2006, p. 8). Neither is this absence explained by the chronological framing
of the book, which includes texts by Vilanova Artigas and others from the late 1950s,
when the building of the capital dominated discussion in Brazil. It is as if the capital
has been deliberately excised from history. Xavier says nothing about this, although
Zein, also writing in the 1980s, alludes to Bras lias toxic character for the countrys
architects. Because it was entrenched as the headquarters of the army after the 1964
military coup, it became difcult for the largely left-leaning architectural profession
to treat it with equanimity. To engage with Bras lia at all became to engage with
something faintly disgusting, to which only wicked and reactionary people would
devote themselves (Zein, 2003, p. 102). Architects, it should be said, had good reason
to fear the military. After 1964, a number of prominent architects were banned from
teaching, while the eminent and highly successful Vilanova Artigas was imprisoned
for his political views in 1967, and his architect pupils Sergio Ferro and Rodrigo
Lefe`vre were jailed in 1969 for political activities (Arantes, 2002, p. 35, pp. 9598). In
this context, the response to Bras lia is understandable. In Maria Alice Junqueira
Bastoss survey history of Brazilian architecture, Bras lia is a clearly dened point of
rupture, after which everything changes (Bastos, 2000, pp. 38).
The concept of Brasilias disappearance is now well developed in foreign histories
of the city. Kenneth Frampton, once highly sympathetic to Niemeyer, described
Bras lia as a moment of rupture in the history of Modernism. The city is a grotesque
anachronism, a travesty of the values of Modernism whose failures have global
implications (Frampton, 1992, pp. 256257). In Andreoli and Forty (2004), the
disappearance extends to all of Brazils architectural production: compared to the
1940s and 1950s, they write, when European architectural magazines published
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every signicant new Brazilian project, since the 1960s there has only been silence
(Andreoli and Forty, 2004, p. 8). The silence, they note, has not just been from those
international magazines, but from within Brazil itself (Andreoli and Forty, 2004,
p. 36). In Fraser, Bras lia disappears after having been dismissed as puerile, exotic,
irrelevant, or simply wrong (Fraser, 2000, p. 255 her emphasis). For these writers,
the reasons for the citys disappearance from architectural history are varied, but
may include Max Bills ferocious attack on what he saw as Brazils wilful formalism
in 1954. Bill denounced what he could see as a travesty of the principles of the
Modern Movement. Complaining about a street in Sao Paulo, Bill wrote that he had
seen some shocking things
modern architecture sunk to the depths, a riot of anti-social waste lacking any
sense of responsibility towards the business occupant or his customersythick
pilotis, thin pilotis, pilotis of whimsical shapes lacking any structural rhyme or
reason, disposed all over the place (Architectural Review, 1954, p. 258).
The European perception of Brazil, and by extension, Bras lia, never really
recovered from this attack, which, whatever its accuracy, identied Brazilian
modernism as other. Other factors in Bras lias disappearance were the United
States loss of interest in the region after a long period of cultivating economic and
social ties, and the fact that Brazilian modernist architecture was too easily set apart
from the mainstream, so resisting proper historicization (Andreoli and Forty, 2004,
p. 11). The most convincing reason is perhaps that put forward by Guillerme Wisnik.
The foreign journals had nothing much to write about apart from Brazil in the 1940s
and 1950s; after Bras lia, Europe was newly resurgent, both in terms of ideas, and
architectural production, and journalistic attention wandered elsewhere (Andreoli
and Forty, 2004, p. 36).
2.2. The anthropological turn
But disappearance is a trope, of course. The city does not disappear as a real
object, nor does it disappear as a discursive one. It may disappear from the pages of
the somewhat self-regarding architectural journals, but it does make an appearance
from time to time in architectural discourse. The rst major book on the city to be
published in English, Norma Evensons Two Brazilian Capitals, appeared in 1973,
and is a measured, calm historical appraisal of the city, from plan to implementation
(Evenson, 1973). It recognizes certain shifts in critical opinion, but cannot be located
in a discourse about disappearance. No, what happens is less a disappearance, than a
shift in the discourse from one eld of inquiry to another. This is to be expected:
architectural criticism has rarely concerned itself with buildings post-occupation.
Once constructed, a building becomes the property, in both real and discursive
terms, of someone else. So it is with Bras lia. After 1960, the city remained an object
of considerable interest, including interest from abroad, but the locus of the
discourse changed. It became an object of anthropological rather than architectural
concern. The city itself seemed to raise anthropological questions. In the design of
the residential units, Lucio Costa imagined a social mix previously unheard of in
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Brazil: a mixture of social classes was to share the same neighbourhood facilities, if
not live in the same buildings (Costa, 1957, article 17, discussed in Holston, 1989,
p. 78). The individual ats tended to exclude quarters for domestic staff, supposing a
more equal distribution of domestic labour. The architecture of the city presupposed
altogether new ways of socialising and movement. Further, it quickly became known
that (as Frampton put it) Bras lia was in effect not one but two new cities, the formal
one designed by Costa housing the bureaucrats, and an informal city on the
periphery housing the construction workers (Frampton, 1992, p. 256). This added a
further attraction for visiting anthropologists.
The anthropological turn in the literature on Bras lia might have been represented
by Janice Perlman, whose book The Myth of Marginality (1976) was originally
conceived as a study of Bras lia as lived by its residents. She visited the city in 1968,
but abandoned the idea of studying it when she discovered how abnormal the city
then was by comparison with the rest of Brazil. She turned instead to two Rio
favelas, and wrote about them (Perlman, 1976, p. xvii). But two other American
anthropologists did take up the challenge, David Epstein, and slightly later,
James Holston. Epsteins book was the result of eld research done in 1969,
during a stay of several months in the capital with a Brazilian wife and young
child. His initial experience was of the Pilot Plan, but he moved shortly afterwards to
an illegal invasao (invasion) called Seguridade Social (Social Security) straddling
the main highway south from the capital. His profoundly autobiographical
experience of the capital was framed by the camp on the periphery; his view of
the centre was uncompromisingly critical. Where he was not critical of the
design of the new buildings, he was dismissive of its taste. While identifying himself
powerfully with the camp on the periphery, he felt enough of a continuing
attachment to the centre to dismiss its taste as irredeemably provincial: Brasilia
wears its international, modern, appearance unconvincingly as one discovers if one
tries, for instance, to buy white, undecorated cups and saucers. Popular tastes run to
plastic owers, formica furniture and last years fashions (Epstein, 1973, p. 103).
Epsteins book is so powerfully focused on the peripheral camp that it has little to
say about the ofcial city. Its analyses of the citys built form scramble towards a
critical judgement.
In tone, in its autobiographical content, and general air of despair, Epstein much
less resembles Norma Evensons architectural history of the city published the same
year than it does Quarto de Despejo (published in 1962 in English as Beyond all
Pity), the diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus, a long suffering resident of a Sao Paulo
favela (de Jesus, 1962). Quarto de Despejo takes the form of a diary, and is a series of
personal reections on a desperate situation. A publishing sensation both inside and
(later) outside Brazil, it provided the mood music for subsequent publishing on the
Brazilian city. Here is the city as dystopia, in which all attempts at modernization or
organization are futile. I say more about Epsteins precise interest in Bras lias
periphery in the second part of this paper. But I cite it here because, whatever its
problems, it identies a shift in mood in the discussion of the city. Here the quality of
despair is so great that aesthetic questions simply seem unethical. It is a most
profound shift of emphasis. In Epstein, architecture, in effect, disappears to be
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replaced by people; where the built environment appears at all, it is in the form of the
informal and often degraded environment of Seguridade Social.
The disappearance of architecture from Epsteins work has a parallel in the
sociological work on Brasilia done at the University of Bras lia by Aldo Paviani and
colleagues starting in the 1980s, one of the major bodies of literature on the city
inside Brazil (see Paviani, 1985, 1987, 1991, 1996). Here architecture disappears to be
replaced by space in analyses that owed much to the work of Michel Foucault, Louis
Althusser, Antoni Gramsci, and the Marxist urban sociologist Manuel Castells as
well as even sometimes Friedrich Engels, whose Condition of the Working Class in
England was evidently still a live text for left-leaning sociologists working in Brazil in
the 1970s and 1980s. The 1991 collection, A Conquista da Cidade (The Conquest of
the City) is a good example of Pavianis approach (Paviani, 1991).
The book is divided into two parts. The rst deals with the citys organization of
space, the second, popular movements. In the rst, the analysis of the city is
underwritten by a series of assumptions: that the city is an exaggerated experiment in
social control (the capital of control, according to one of the authors, Luiz Alberto
Gouvea); that it is highly segregated in terms of social class, with segregation
represented by spatial separation; that such segregation was planned from the outset
by the citys designers, regardless of their egalitarian rhetoric; that the city is
profoundly and irrevocably unjust.
The analysis of space is well represented by Pavianis own essay in this volume,
A construc- ao injusta do espac- o urbano (the unjust construction of urban space)
(Paviani, 1991, pp. 115142). Here Paviani describes injustice in urban development
as a feature of all cities, but Bras lia as an unusual case: as a profoundly ideological
city, representative internationally of Brazils own modernization, it could not be
allowed to have the blemishes that other large metropolitan areas had, specically
favelas. Bras lia suppressed the favela from an early stage in favour of the creation of
satellite towns that removed the question of poverty to the periphery, beyond the
sight of the residents of the Pilot Plan. Bras lia, by contrast with other Brazilian
cities, had to represent the modern, writes Paviani, making it concrete in the daring
style of its lines and its architecture (Paviani, 1991, pp. 127). Modernity here is, in
effect cruelty. Aesthetic questions become ethically suspect, and architecture
dissolves into (conicted) space.
This kind of analysis is useful as a rst step in a critique about Brasilia, a city
which as Paviani makes clear, was legitimized from the start by boasting and pride
(Paviani, 1991, pp. 124125). But its critique is the product of a particular time, when
(as we have already seen from Zein) Bras lia was, because of its association with the
military, a polarizing subject. Both Pavianis work, and in a slightly different way
that of Epstein, suffer the same problem: in dispensing with architecture in favour of
architectures users (that is anthropology or sociology) they oversimplify and reduce
the city. Having identied with the margins (social and physical) of the city, they
effectively abandon the centre. Theirs is a markedly ideological approach, which
makes perfect sense as a historically specic intervention in a battle against the real
enemy of the military government. But it is an approach that has limits. It can only
regard architecture and planning as instrumental, as simple products of ideologies; it
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has little to say about those for whom Bras lia was built; it has nothing at all to say
about the visual realm, that is what Bras lia looks like. It loses much of the
complexity and paradoxical quality of the actual built environment in an argument
in which everything is reduced to relations of power.
Both Epstein and Paviani are good examples of what might be called the
anthropological turn in writing about Bras lia. For a more sophisticated analysis,
although a no less problematical one, I turn to what is now very probably the most
widely cited study of Bras lia in English, James Holstons book The Modernist City:
An Anthropological Critique of Braslia. Based on doctoral research done between
1980 and 1982, it describes by contrast with Epstein a city in a period of relative
political and cultural, if not economic, stability, during which time Bras lia had
matured. Unlike earlier studies, Holston neither comes to heap architectural praise
on the city, nor condemn it; his work draws on both architectural and
anthropological-sociological traditions, in search of something like a synthesis.
Crucially (unlike Epstein and Paviani) he allows that criticism of the way the city
functions or is organized does not preclude an appreciation of its architectural
qualities. Holstons analysis, as we shall see, has some parallels with the earlier
Marxist-derived analyses described above. But it departs from them in that it does
not regard architecture as simply instrumental an expression of an ideology but
asserts that it has an independent life worth study in its own right. He is careful,
therefore, to declare his qualied admiration for the city on the opening pages, as
well as acknowledging that what he does is a critique (Holston, 1989, p. xiv).
The book divides into three parts. The rst, The Myth of the Concrete, deals with
Lucio Costas plan, its origins, and its relation to existing models of architectural
space, particularly those devised by Le Corbusier. Here, Holston claims with
recourse to copious visual resources as well as texts that Bras lia is a CIAM city,
referring to the Congre`s Internationaux dArchitecture Moderne, the principal
vehicle for the promotion of Le Corbusiers ideas, founded in 1928. Holston
elaborates: this is not just a CIAM city, but the most complete example ever
constructed of the architectural and planning tenets put forward in CIAM
manifestos (Holston, 1989, p. 31). The argument, Holston says, is easily
demonstrated (Holston, 1989, p. 31). The city, he says, easily conforms to CIAMs
1933 Athens Charter, which divided urban life into four functions (housing, work,
recreation and circulation) and demanded distinct spaces for each: zoning, in other
words. Holston writes that Bras lia is a perfect illustration of these principles
(Holston, 1989, p. 32). He goes on to make a visual comparison between Bras lia,
mostly in the perspective drawings produced by Lucio Costa, and Le Corbusiers
Contemporary City for Three Million Inhabitants of 1922 (Fig. 4). Here the argument
rests on a formal comparison between the two: in both cases, perspective drawings
depict a modern city dened by a geometrical plan and ranks of geometrical
buildings; both describe a city organized around a major arterial highway, giving a
strong impression of speed and movement; both have green space as an organizing
principle, locating, as it were, the city in the park. The similarity of rst impressions
between the two cities is striking, although at detail level there are signicant
differences as we shall see.
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The second part, The City Defamiliarized moves away from the concept of the
Pilot Plan towards its detailed implementation. Two issues are uppermost here, both
deriving from detailed observation of the city as inhabited. The rst is what Holston
stages as the death of the street. Here, he describes the Pilot Plans efforts to abolish
the traditional concept of the street (and street corner) in favour of zones of
interaction based around particular functions. Motor trafc, for example, now
occupies a zone given over only to that purpose, that is to say the highway axis and
its extensions. Here trafc is sublimated: there is nothing, save other trafc, to hold it
up. Holston is particularly interested in the neighbourhood shopping areas, which
likewise evidence the attempt to abolish the street as a form of socialization, by
turning the shop fronts away from the street, and towards the pedestrian accesses
from the residential blocks. This, Holston describes, was almost immediately
subverted by local businesses who understood the intended fronts as backs and
instated the major access from the road. This is in fact how it is today, with the
intended organization of the retail units frankly reversed, which produces an effect
very close to that of the traditional street. In this case, what Holston nds fascinating
is the reversion to traditional forms of urbanization despite the attempt to design
them out of existence. The street, far from dying, vigorously re-emerges.
The second part of The City Defamiliarized is an account of the social
organization of the different zones of the city, in particular the organization of the
residential parts, or superquadras with their attempt to envisage a more egalitarian
social life. It is an attempt that Holston describes mostly as a failure, the
superquadras as he sees them reproducing rather than ameliorating Brazils social
divisions. In one highly suggestive passage, he describes how the apartments of the
superquadras were built without the accommodation for domestic staff typical of
traditional Brazilian middle-class dwellings no room for a maid, nor the interstitial
space between servant and public quarters known as the copa. The thinking, as he
describes it, was that the abolition of such spaces would anticipate a society in which
domestic labour did not need to exist. The reality, however, was that domestic labour
did indeed continue to exist, and the lack of proper provision for it at Bras lia
produced a real deterioration in working conditions for domestic staff. Either they
endured cramped and entirely unsuitable accommodation a broom-cupboard or
suchlike or else a long and expensive daily commute to the Pilot Plan from one of
the citys satellites (Holston, 1989, pp. 177182).
Various important assumptions run all the way through Holstons book: rst, a
commitment to urban, as opposed to suburban values; second, a distrust of state-
imposed solutions; third, a distrust of market-led solutions; fourth, a belief (though
rarely explicit) in traditional forms of urbanization, such as the Prac- a da Se in the
centre of Sao Paulo (Holston, 1989, pp. 312313); fth, a belief in the value of the
public realm; nally, a belief, again never explicit, that the adaptation of modernist
forms (such as those adaptations mentioned above) in some way constitutes a
failure of the plan that produced them in the rst place. In sum, Holstons position is
very like that of the anti-modernists whose critique was in the ascendent as
he was writing. Holston does not say much about this, but his bibliography cites a
number of key anti-modernist sources: Rowe and Koetters Collage City, Rykwerts
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Fig. 4. Comparison of Lucio Costas Pilot Plan for Bras lia, 1957 (top) with Le Corbusiers
A Contemporary City for Three Million Inhabitants (bottom). Reproduced from James Holston (1989)
The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Braslia (p. 33). Chicago University Press, Chicago.
The Idea of a Town, Manfredo Tafuris Architecture and Utopia. Holstons visceral
sense of the value of the urban public realm is very like that of these writers.
One of the more revealing passages in Holston concerns a small shopping mall on
the north wing of the city (Fig. 5). The passage bears citing in full:
Locally referred to as Babylonia, 205206 North is a veritable palace of

consumption: a ziggurat qua mall complete with arched windows, roof terraces,
scissor ramps, labyrinthine corridors lined with expensive shops and play areas
for the toddlers of Bras lias new elite. As a nal solution, it eliminates beyond
doubt, recall, or even memory all traces of the traditional shopping street. With
its stores internalized into the bowels of the building, the malls facades appear
as high, blank white walls, above and behind which the arched windows of the
internal corridors rise. To let the road pass through it, the structure divides in
half, turning the public accessway into a speedway connector. Parking is no
longer available along the accessway but is relegated to the sides of the
structure. A landscaped mini-lawn replaces the sidewalk, leaving hazardously
little space for pedestrians to walk between the buildings anks and the road.
Perhaps having realized that there are so few pedestrians in Bras lia, architects
have simply ceased making traditional gestures to them like store windows
and sidewalks (Holston, 1989, pp. 142143).
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Here Holston deals with one of the more recent developments in the Pilot Plan, a
retail strip from the late 1970s that in fact still exists, and has been comprehensively
adapted in the now traditional Brasiliense way that is to say, reversed, and turned
back into a traditional street. I cite the passage because it reveals more clearly than
most Holstons value system, but also some intriguing ambiguities in these values.
The values are clear enough: hostility to commercial development, hostility to
development that seems to ignore or reject the public realm, suspicion of authority,
in purely architectural terms, a dislike of kitsch. The language is exaggerated here:
the allusion to Nazi Germany (a nal solution) rather stands out. It is also a
somewhat ambiguous passage, as is the rest of the book. On the one hand, Holston
sees that Babylonia is a logical extension of the modern urbanity represented by the
rest of Bras lia, and its process of fragmentation and segregation. Yet at the same
time, he cannot bear the older parts of the Pilot Plan that have responded to the
needs and desires of its inhabitants, and changed: his account of the reversed shop
fronts is infused with a sense of melancholy as if to say that this can only be read as
failure. In other words, Holston is caught between modernist and anti-modernist
positions, and is unable to resolve the dilemma. The local shopping areas now have
an oddly new urbanist character about them wholly unintentional, but no less
attractive or successful for that. As Holanda has argued, they are one of the few
parts of the Pilot Plan that has genuine urbanity (Holanda, 2002, p. 356). Yet
Holston cannot approve, seemingly because they involve a(n) (anti-modernist)
departure from the original plan. In a similar vein, looking at Babylonia now, one
might be forgiven for thinking that it was an attempt however, half-hearted to
introduce some extra urbanity into the Plan, not take it away. Whatever one thinks
of the architecture, it is an attempt to make some kind of a landmark, and it is, as
Holston admits, a building that as much as its street frontage is crude, also actually
denes a street. And in its current, adapted, form, it is certainly as urban as any other
of the local shopping areas in the city. Yet Holstons residual modernism means that
it must be rejected.
2.3. Braslia lived
In retrospect, Holstons book has a historical character that may be seen as a

product of its time. On the one hand it is highly dogmatic, a product of both the
Modernism and the Marxism of the available literature on which the author had to
draw. His argument about Bras lias Modernism is a highly reductive one, in
retrospect: few would say now that Bras lia was straightforwardly a CIAM city,
given what we now know about the importance of national identity (Andreoli and
Forty, 2004, pp. 2225). Even Holstons images tend to refute his argument the more
one looks at them. Le Corbusiers Contemporary City for Three Million People,
whatever its outward similarities to Costas Pilot Plan, dwarfs Bras lia in scale:
Costas superquadras are at most six storeys in height, and form a low-key, human-
scaled environment that is often bucolic in nature. Le Corbusiers city is formed of
buildings ten times the height, where human beings are visibly, and intentionally,
dwarfed. Yet Holston can also see things that do not t into the Modernist pattern,
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Fig. 5. Babylonia shopping mall, Brasilia. Reproduced from James Holston (1989) The Modernist City:
An Anthropological Critique of Braslia (p. 143). Chicago University Press, Chicago.
even if he cannot bring himself to endorse them. The reversed shop fronts are a case
in point. His work may therefore be said to point the way to another kind of analysis
of the city, even if at the moment of writing such analysis is for him still
unacceptable. Such an analysis would be accepting of the citys Modernist heritage,
but also open to its development or adaptation in other words, a more open, more
realistic, less dogmatic understanding of the city.
Such an approach can be found in the work of a number of Brazilian architects
and critics. It is a position well represented in Ruth Verde Zeins criticism, for
example, in which she advocates a Bras lia that is conceived of as both more
extensive geographically than the Pilot Plan, and a city that is open to change. The
city, as far as she is concerned is a megalopolis, vast in extent, already far exceeding
the Pilot Plan in scope and imagination. This highly extended city is also
predominantly good in her view (Brillembourg, 2004, p. 159). It is a position that
sidesteps both the Modernist view of the city, in which everything (paradoxically)
must be preserved, and the Marxist one, in which everything must be abolished. Both
are essentially absolutist positions that have little to say about the present state of
things.
Apart from Zein (whose publications on Bras lia are in any case, limited) among
the exponents of this more realistic Bras lia are Frederico de Holanda amongst other
architects at the University of Bras lia. The key term in de Holandas work is
morphology, his project deriving originally from doctoral research done with Bill
Hillier and the Space Syntax group at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London.
The key output of this work is O Espac- o de Excec- ao (Exceptional Space) published
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in 2002. Using the methodology of space syntax as a starting point, de Holanda

describes the capital as an exceptional space that in terms of use and perception
owes as much to pre-modern ceremonial spaces as to modern spaces: he cites the pre-
Columbian settlement of Teotihuacan, Zulu Kraals and medieval French castles as
possible reference points. The value of this argument in the present context is
twofold. First, it extends the range of possible reference points far beyond
architectural modernism, and in so doing sidesteps increasingly sterile questions of
its success or failure. Second, it extends the understanding of the city beyond the
Pilot Plan, and thereby moves beyond equally sterile distinctions between centre and
periphery. Almost all the literature up to and including Holston was preoccupied,
indeed motivated by centre-periphery relations. The image of a wealthy centre
surrounded by an ocean of poverty is obsessive. Holandas work (like Zeins) takes a
metropolitan view, in which the status of the Pilot Plan is not an immutable fact, but
open to question. The approach has been remarkable in making visible a class, the
urban middle class, about whom all kinds of assumptions were made without much
data having been collected.
The argument about class is particularly well represented in the article Bras lia
Beyond Ideology, published as part of an issue of Docomomo in 2000 to coincide
with that organizations major conference in the city. In the article, Holanda argues
that the form of the city is much less well understood than is generally supposed, in
particular how it performs according to different expectations of different social
actors involved (Holanda, 2000, p. 28). There has been, surprisingly perhaps, a
general absence in the literature around the city of a rigorous, systematic and
detailed description of its urbanistic form (Holanda, 2000, p. 28). What he means is
not the surface description of the monuments of the central city a description often
done uncritically, with the agreement or support of the architects but an account of
the whole city, including not just the monuments but the spaces around them,
however, unimportant they may appear. This approach develops that seen, for
example, in Holston, where the reversal of the entrances to the retail units in the
residential wings takes on a special importance. But where for Holston the case
represents the failure of the project, for Holanda, it shows the citys relative maturity
and capacity to adapt. In his work, Bras lia is implicitly much bigger than a single
plan. For most observers, especially recent ones conditioned by a belief that urban
space must be full (of activity, of life), the empty spaces of the Monumental Axis are
useless, an indicator of the citys failure at plan level. Such views are conditioned too
perhaps by the experience of post-war housing projects in Europe and the United
States in which any open space had a tendency to quickly degrade.
In Bras lias Monumental Axis, by contrast, Holanda points to a positive
perception of open space. For those with a trans-spatial lifestyle, that is largely the
middle class living in one part of the city, working and playing in others, the open
space here was profoundly appreciated in symbolic terms (Holanda, 2000, p. 32). It
therefore had a use, albeit not one that involved inhabiting the space, but rather
passing through it or observing it from a distance. As Holanda describes, large
empty spaces constitute the other side of the coin of an essentially trans-spatial
lifestyle (Holanda, 2000, p. 32). The implication here is that the trans-spatial
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lifestyle involves the use of a number of morphologically different, and widely

scattered spaces; the open space between them provides a conceptual unity between
them. This is not to argue the open spaces are satisfactory for everyone far from it:
in important respects, Bras lia constitutes an expensive, uncomfortable and even
dangerous setting to be lived in, particularly for manual workers, but also for
pedestrians in general (Holanda, 2000, p. 34). But the observation about the use of
space for its symbolic value is a crucial one nonetheless, for it identies major aspects
of the city that had not been previously reported. As he puts it, encounter systems
have almost completely been ignored in the previous literature.
Holanda is critical of the traditional assumptions about Bras lias social life or
lack of it: of Holstons observation that Bras lia has no street corners, he claims that
it has no statistical basis (Holanda, 2000, p. 30). But he goes further, to argue that
the city has plenty of spaces that either resemble or, in fact, are street corners. This
idea is developed further in the collection Arquitectura e Urbanidade (2003) in
particular the essay on the Avenida W-3, a major north-south axis of the city, built
as a commercial strip, but long in decline. The essay surveys the rise and fall of this
neglected part of the city. There is an extensive pictorial survey here, as well as a
discussion of the use and perception of the street based on statistical surveys. There is
also, nally, a set of architectural proposals for the streets future.
Holandas conclusion to the 2000 essay is instructive:
In the case of Bras lia there is a strange fear that the consideration of the ethical
dimension may seriously damage the aesthetic dimension. On the contrary I
think it perfectly possible that we may have a city which is at the same time good
and beautiful both for its daily users, and for the distant traveler who comes
once in a lifetime for its appreciation (Holanda, 2000, p. 35).
This is a subtle but important conclusion: here Holanda identies a key faultline in
the critical reception of Bras lia to date, between ethics and aesthetics. For those
concerned with broadly ethical questions such as social exclusion (for example
Epstein, Holston, Paviani) the citys aesthetic qualities are downplayed, or described
as somehow productive of the citys fundamental cruelty an argument developed
by the radical architect Sergio Ferro in respect of the labour intensive production of
the twin domes of the Congress building (Ferro, 2006, p. 314). For modernist
architectural critics, such ethical questions cannot be allowed to affect the complete
form of the city. This is why, as Holanda has argued elsewhere, it has been so
difcult to make humane adjustments to the citys fabric, building, for example, safe
pedestrian crossings across the highway axis, as the citys UNESCO status was
granted on aesthetic grounds. Expanding on views put forward by Lucio Costa
himself, Holanda argues that the city could be made more humane with appropriate
additions to the urban fabric that would not, he thinks, compromise its overall form.
This approach, which nds a middle way between ethics and aesthetics, might be
compared with the work of Fare`s El-Dahdah on Bras lias superquadras (El-Dahdah,
2005). In this collection of essays, there is, as in Holandas work, a concern for the
actual state of things, post-construction, post-occupancy; signs of decay or change
are not interpreted as evidence of failure, as they are in the previous literature; a
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different architectural future is imagined in which the Pilot Plan is subtly adapted
while maintaining its modernist character. As in Holandas work, El-Dahdah sees
the need to maintain an ethical dimension in the understanding of the built environ-
ment. At the same time, an ethics is not exclusive of an appreciation of the citys
aesthetic qualities. This position is an important advance, it seems to me, and a mark
of Bras lias normalization. To move beyond simplistic questions of success or failure
is an indicator of the citys maturity, and that of the critical positions around it.
2.4. Braslia exoticized
The normalization of Bras lia in architectural discourse both inside and outside of
Brazil is welcome. It indicates that the city has moved beyond the stage it was at in
the 1970s and 1980s, when it was discursively toxic, an object of peculiar and
minority interest, for the most part ignored. It also indicates that it is possible to
imagine a future for the city beyond the Pilot Plan, that the city can be imagined in
metropolitan terms without forgetting the original vision. These developments, seen
in the work of the circle around Holanda, are welcome from both an historical and
an architectural point of view. Bras lias increasingly normal prole in academic
discourse has been accompanied by its re-emergence outside of Brazil in other
literatures as an aesthetic object of an increasingly exotic kind.
The sources of this are largely architectural, but I will also refer to a few
journalistic sources as well. The presence of Bras lia in this journalistic literature has
a distinct character that has certain things in common with its presence in earlier
literatures. Like the early apparition of Bras lia, it is both exoticizing and dystopian.
The city is presented as unique, exotic, remote, and singular; its aesthetic
characteristics are generally praised, but it appears as a fundamentally bad place.
There is an important difference, however, with the early reports of the city. In the
years around inauguration, reports of Bras lia are fraught with anxiety about the
citys value as a model for contemporary architecture and urbanism. Its success or
failure was a matter not just of local, but global concern, for here, on the largest
imaginable scale was an experiment in modernist urbanism (see Frampton, 1992;
also Arantes, 2004, p. 101). Max Bills derogatory remarks about Brazil, made in
1954, are indicative: his displeasure at what he saw as the arbitrary and baroque
character of contemporary buildings is much more than a matter of personal taste,
but a perceived traducing of the principles of modernist architecture itself. The
offence he takes is in theory not personal, but on behalf of the movement. The early
criticism of Bras lia infuses judgements about local taste with anxieties about the
future of the modern movement. For European critics writing in the early 1960s,
Bras lia was an object in which they had much invested. They owned it, in effect, as
an experiment, and their criticism of it was informed by a keen sense that it
represented a European as much as a local future (Jornal do Brasil, 1959).
That sense of ownership, prevalent in the early criticism, is absent from more
recent writing (Hall, 2005 is a small, but important, exception). The city is still
bizarre, dysfunctional, and dystopian, but it no longer exists as an object of anxiety,
but an oddity whose difference can be touristically enjoyed. To put it another way,
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Bras lia no longer has any purchase on the critical imagination as a model, but it can
be appreciated as an aesthetic object located in a different time and place. In this
scenario, the citys negative character is frequently exaggerated for literary effect,
and its eccentricities played up; here, with the writer in the position of uncommitted
visitor, Bras lias badness can be pleasurable, the stuff of adventure. This is largely a
journalistic phenomenon, but is present in otherwise respectable sources such as
Andreoli and Forty (2004): here a series of scholarly essays takes second place to
spectacular photography, which exaggerates the citys fantastic character.
The approach identied here is exemplied particularly well in the criticism
published around the opening of Niemeyers Serpentine Gallery pavilion in London,
a temporary structure that occupied the lawn outside the gallery in the summer of
2003. The presence of this structure led to much renewed speculation about Bras lia,
not least because its catenary roof referenced one of the citys iconic buildings, the so
called Igrejinha (little church) in the 308 South superquadra. The British critic
Jonathan Glancey referred to Bras lia as a science ction city, its Congress
buildings the headquarters of a Martian leadership (Glancey, 2003). Hannah
Baldock in Icon described a city made for a race of hyper-intelligent Volkswagens
rather than people, a city designed to speed up Darwinian processes of natural
selection by murdering its residents in trafc accidents, where day-to-day survival for
visitors is a test of wits (Baldock, 2003). Carlos Moreira Teixeira wrote in 2005 for
the French journal LArchitecture dAujourdhui that the city was simultaneously
ghastly and beautiful, a species of urban desert or wasteland in which architecture
was futile in the face of the enormity of the surrounding landscape (Teixeira, 2005,
p. 103). Let more lth come forth! he declaimed: let, in other words, the city become
even less a city than it already is. The report was accompanied by large-scale
photographs by Emmanuel Pinard, which showed a vast, barren landscape, all dust,
cracked earth, and discarded plastic bags, in which are located the semi-ruins of the
modern city. It is an apocalyptic vision no less, but one which provides both the
writer and the photographer with the pleasure of the sublime. In accounts like these,
the citys faults become a source of temporary amusement or distraction, indeed they
become the motivation for the visit. For visitors such as these, one senses that the
city must, come what may, live up to its dystopian reputation.
A particularly good instance of this recent exoticization of the city appeared in
LArchitecture dAujourdhui in 1997. It is worth some commentary, because it explicitly
stages a return to the city after its inauguration. Its authors are an architectural
journalist Yannis Tsiomis, and a well-known French novelist, Jean Rolin, but a vital
part of the exercise involves bringing back to Bras lia the Swiss photographer Rene
Burr who had produced a number of canonical images of the city in 1960 for the
photographic agency, Magnum. Rolins account is organized around a series of nine
vignettes of the city, from the hotel and shopping areas in the centre, to the experience
of life in the residential wings (both south and north), to the phenomenon of the
invasion, to life in a satellite town, Ceilandia. It is highly poetic Rolin is
temperamentally drawn to the perverse, the extreme, and the contradictory. He
demands the city be exotic, so when it is not, he is disappointed: the Conjunto Nacional
shopping centre, for example, lets him down because it reminds him too much of
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Bagnolet, a western suburb of Paris (Tsiomis and Rolin, 1997, p. 81). The Conic, an
adjoining mall, is better for his purposes, because it contains both a lively evangelical
church (which has taken over the local cinema) but also, by poetic contrast, a striptease
joint. His account of the residential areas of the Pilot Plan plays up the differences
between two corresponding areas, the 308 South and the 306 North, with similar
situations in relation the centre. At 308 South, not a button is missing; the architecture
(some by Niemeyer) and landscaping (by Roberto Burle Marx) is superb; the polished
marble of the entrances to the superblocks gleams with ferocious intensity. By contrast,
306 North is according to Rolin, denitely the ugliest place I laid eyes on, all cracked
paving and abandoned supermarket trolleys, populated by youths who emulate the
Chicano gangs of Los Angeles. Rolin and Burri pause to reect on the citys
predilection for mysticism a giant pyramid apparently covers the city in the fth
dimension while its residents are the reincarnation of ancient Egyptians before they
move on to visit the satellite towns, which do not disappoint. Ceilandia is big, confusing
and centreless, with an impressively high murder rate, ten times that of the Pilot Plan.
They move on further away from civilization to a gigantic, open dump where
swarms of tip-up trucks and bulldozers are constantly at work, along with
hundreds of poor people many of them children, busy picking over garbage
(while their horses crop the top layer as they wait to draw carts to the recycling
plants). There are thousands of more or less dung-eating birds too: Eagles
(caracaras), vultures (urubus) and white egrets, which last named, on weekends,
are the delight of the rich Lake-side residents, who apparently think they feed
on nothing but fresh sh (Tsiomis and Rolin 1997, p. 87)
This passage, the last of a series of vignettes, strikes me for two reasons. First is the
fact that Rolin ends his account on the margins rather than the centre. The lasting
impression of the city the one the author wishes to leave as true is therefore not
the monumental centre, but the informal and mostly illegal city excluded by it. The
second thing that strikes me is the image of the white egret, a beautiful bird held in
much affection by Brasilienses whose bright plumage belies its revolting diet. Rolin is
sufciently taken with this image to repeat it at the very end of the essay. Over the
dark waters of the lake he concludes,
immaculate egrets (y) y in groups so incompatible with the memory of their
disgusting feasts that one wonders whether it wasnt just a dream and whether
what presents itself before ones eyes now is not the sole reality of Bras lia
(Tsiomis and Rolin, 1997, p. 87)
A metaphor for the city as a whole, it asserts that whatever beauty exists has its
roots in lth. What Rolin does here is reiterate the dystopian narrative about
Bras lia, but this time for entertainment value. No longer does the critic have any
commitment to the city, or feel it offers a useful model. Bras lia exists instead as the
pretext for adventure tourism. One visits much in the same way one would go white
water rafting or bungee-jumping. And this is increasingly how the city has been
marketed to internal tourists, a pleasure zone of spectacular possibilities, all in the
true sense, extra-ordinary (Governo do Distrito Federal (GDF), 2001, pp. 4249).
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CHAPTER 3
The Pilot Plan after 1960
The historiography of Bras lia bears such extensive examination for two reasons.
Firstly, the city is immersed in myth, often of a negative kind, and the myths
themselves have changed signicantly over time. The negative myth portrayed now
in, for example, Jean Rolins 1997 travelogue, is different in important ways from the
plain disgust communicated by many foreign observers in the days following
inauguration. Secondly, the historiography of the central city is in many ways the
history of the Pilot Plan since inauguration, given that the citys form was xed in
1957, and since 1960, very little has been built that calls that form into question. One
of the fascinations of the central city is how little it has changed, how it is possible,
on large parts of the monumental axis, or in parts of the southern residential wing, to
stage the same photographs as Gautherot or Burri took at the time of inauguration.
But it should not be assumed that there has been no change at all. In this section of
the paper, I discuss briey two aspects of the contemporary Pilot Plan: its status as a
UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the character of some of the more recent
buildings in the Plan. As we will see, the change to the Plan has been more signicant
than is initially apparent, and the nature of that change has produced some
continuity with the newer building on the periphery. Very little has been said about
any of the newer buildings. Because they often, surprisingly, break with the
principles of the Plan, they do not appear in architectural criticism. They may not be
great buildings, but collectively what they say about the continuing adaptation and
development of the Plan is important.
3.1. UNESCO status
Bras lia was awarded UNESCO (United Nations Education, Science and Culture
Organization) World Heritage Status in 1987. The award was made on the basis of a
report compiled by ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites, a
Paris-based non-governmental organization). The status which gives it the same
value as the Taj Mahal and the Great Pyramid of Cheops was granted, without
debate at the 11th session of the committee. At this stage, it might be noted that
UNESCO itself was in a state of some disarray, membership having been withdrawn
by a number of key states, including Britain and the United States: the decision,
although unanimous, cannot be said, for example, really to represent the views of the
Anglophone world (Pearson, 2006). The committee rstly commended the Brazilian
authorities for taking steps to preserve Bras lia (the Brazilians had approached
UNESCO with the idea of listing), and secondly, recommended that the Pilot Plan
be further entrenched in future development in an ongoing process of the protection
and management of the city (UNESCO World Hertiage Centre, 2006). Although it
was the Plan that had achieved UNESCO status, rather than individual buildings,
some individual structures were praised: the ofcial buildings in particular are
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innovative and imaginative (UNESCO World Hertiage Centre, 2006). The

committee also recommended that a progress report on the implementation of the
Plan be submitted to them in February 2004 (this was considered at the 28th session
of the World Heritage Committee which met in JuneJuly 2004 in Suzhou for
details see WHC, 2004). The committees recommendations adopted without
discussion were the rst instance of a modern structure being listed, and they
clearly saw it as setting a precedent. As Holston has pointed out, this is not
the rst, nor is it the only, act of preservation in relation to Bras lia. Unique among
Brazilian cities, its plan was enshrined in law from the moment of inauguration
(37, law 3.751, 13 April 1960); it has also subsequently been made subject to
acts of preservation in local (state) law, while in 1990, the federal government
inscribed it in the Book of Historic Preservation, an organ regulating Brazilian
historic sites, regulated by the Sociedade do Patrimonio Historico e Artistico
Nacional (Society of National Historical and Artistic Heritage, SPHAN) and
Instituto Brasileiro do Patrimonio Cultural (Brazilian Institute of Cultural Heritage,
IBPC) (Holston, 2004, p. 173).
The basis of the UNESCO decision, the ICOMOS report, is worth summarizing
here, because it provides the most detailed justication for what was done. On the
rst line of the report, Bras lia was located as a city built on the principles of the
Athens Charter, but on an unusually large scale. They noted that the only other
exercise of Charter principles on this scale is Chandigargh. On the plan itself, they
note that it has great expression power (sic.), a cross, but also a giant bird in ight
towards the southeast. Niemeyers monumental architecture was singled out for
praise. His renowned edices were noteworthy in the purity of their forms and
their obvious monumental character, the result of an intelligent balance between
horizontal and vertical buildings, rectangular volumes and curved surfaces, and the
raw, unnished materials and polished surfaces of certain structures (ICOMOS
(International Council on Monuments and Sites), 1987, p. 2). The cluster of
government buildings around the Prac- a dos Tres Poderes was singled out for special
praise: they were structures of exceptional artistic merit. However, the report was
motivated by concern about the physical condition of the city. They expressed alarm
at the growth of the satellite cities in particular. Here, and in the poorer
neighbourhoods of the Pilot Plan, they wrote,
the standards dened by Costa and Niemeyer have been infringed upon in the
greatest disarray. Higher structures in certain sectors, construction in open
spaces, modications of the road network, and other transgressions have
gravely altered a monumental landscape of great quality (ICOMOS (Interna-
tional Council on Monuments and Sites), 1987, p. 3).
The zones they proposed protecting under the aegis of UNESCO were the entirety
of the Pilot Plan, the buffer zone or green belt separating the Pilot Plan from the
satellite cities, and the area around the lake, mostly covered with housing. As is clear
from the report, ICOMOSs recommendation was based on entirely aesthetic
grounds (de Silveira Lobo, 2003, p. 110). They were clearly concerned about the
infringement of the Pilot Plan by such things as the invasion of favelas close to the
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bus station, in the middle of the Monumental Axis, but only on the grounds of their
effect on the composition (Fig. 6). They were unconcerned about the reasons for the
invasion, or what might happen to those residents after the situation was corrected.
Their emphasis on the aesthetics to the exclusion of everything else led them to the
(by then) anachronistic conclusion that the Pilot Plan be further entrenched, despite
its evident problems. There was no understanding that the invasion cited above
might actually have been a function of the lived reality of the Pilot Plan, not
something alien to it. This was by the time of the report a thoroughly anachronistic
conclusion, as the prevailing view in anthropological and sociological accounts of
the Brazilian city was that favela and city must be regarded as mutually dependent,
part of the same system (see for example Perlman, 1976, pp. 117).
The ideology behind the UNESCO listing stressed the preservation of the artistic
vision of a particular historical moment. This generally concurs with the views of its
authors: Lucio Costa for example, wanted preservation in order that future
generations have the chance to see the city as it was originally conceived (Franco,
2004, p. 190). Equally, however, there are suggestions that preservation may have
exceeded even its authors desires. Costas position could be ambiguous. While
favouring preservation as above, he also could speak favourably in 1984 about the
favela on the Monumental Axis close to the bus station. In spite of its prominence, its
open refutation of the formal city, the planner found himself, at least temporarily, in
sympathy: it showed the city was no alien import, but that it had developed authentic
Brazilian roots (Costa, 1984; Lima, 2004, p. 58).
Fig. 6. Illegal invasion on Monumental Axis, Bras lia, mid-1980s. Photograph by Wessel de Jonge.
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There are a number of commentaries on the UNESCO listing, often somewhat

ironic in tone: Wright and Turkienicz, and later, Gorelik for example, have argued
that it represents the de facto end of Bras lias claim to modernity, freezing the city in
a particular moment of the past (Wright and Turkienicz, 1988, p. 347; Gorelik,
2005). Holstons remarks from 2004 move beyond this, as well as his own, earlier
work on the city. He did not criticize preservation in itself, for Bras lias signicance
was for him beyond question (Holston, 2004, p. 163). But he did criticize the listing
on the basis of what it did, or could, preserve, for he regarded the citys true
signicance as lying beyond architecture. It was (as he had already described in 1989)
a city that was made by methods of bricolage, by men with great skill but limited
resources, ready to carry out tasks for which one is not sufciently prepared
(Holston, 2004, p. 167). This led him to argue that experiment and risk ought
somehow be acknowledged as the key terms in the preservation or better,
recognition of the city (Holston, 2004, p. 175). The present situation, he argues, is
unsatisfactory: it has frozen it, turned it into a ghost of a city, and in so doing
ossied the citys class politics. He refers to the demand from the Instituto Brasileiro
do Patrimonio Cultural that nothing be altered in the Pilot Plan that might alter its
quality of life, that is, its privileged character in a sea of relative poverty (Holston,
2004, p. 174). In any case, he concludes about preservation that it has not succeeded
in stopping the development of the North Hotel Sector (SHN), very little of which
has the modernist character of the original city, but is best described as a pastiche of
American postmodernism.
3.2. The additions to the Pilot Plan
It is to the development of the Pilot Plan that I will turn now. At inauguration in
1960, the citys skeleton was complete, and the majority of the principal monuments
of the centre had started to take shape. Most development in the Pilot Plan between
1960 and the end of the dictatorship in 1985 consisted in gap-lling. But it was
not until the 1990s that there have been major additions to the Pilot Plan, of a kind
that call into question its integrity. These works include buildings by both
commercial architects and developers whose interest in the integrity of the Plan is
clearly minimal but I would also include in this group some very recent works by
Niemeyer himself, in which issues of scale and materials appear to be brought into
question in some new ways. Niemeyers post-1960 additions to Bras lia for the most
part date from after his return from political exile in 1985. They include the
Memorial JK, a spectacular marble tomb for the former president, Juscelino
Kubitschek (1980), and the Museu dos Povos Ind genas (1982), a museum of art of
Brazils native peoples which stand adjacent to each other at the far western end of
the Pilot Plan, some 5 km from the National Congress (Figs. 78). Both broadly
conform to an existing vocabulary of sculptural buildings at Bras lia: they are low-
rise, horizontal, low-key, and underline, it might be said, the fundamental character
of the landscape, namely its horizontal extension. The Espac- o Niemeyer (1988,
refurbished 2002) is similar, a tiny, low, circular building: it has some of the
architects trademark devices porthole windows and curves but is so small as to
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Fig. 7. Oscar Niemeyer, Memorial JK, Bras lia, 1980.
make no impact on its location, specically the open land a few hundred metres to
the east of the National Congress.
The same cannot be said about the vast complex for the Procuradoria Geral da
Republica (19952002) (Figs. 9 and 10). This vast complex of 70,000 m2 is located
to the immediate south east of the Prac- a dos Tres Poderes, and consists of
two big drums of equal size, linked by aerial walkways, and covered in blue mirror-
plate glass. The drums differ formally: one rests on a set of rectangular pilotis,
while the other is raised above ground by a single, central concrete pillar, and is
crowned by a concrete star. The buildings house the ofces and meeting chambers of
Brazils highest legal ofcer, the Procurator General, who is responsible for
overseeing constitutional questions, and matters of human rights in particular
(www. arcoweb 2006). It is enormous, equal to or exceeding any of the classic
governmental palaces of the Monumental Axis. But it also departs from them
profoundly in style. The surface materials blue plate glass are much stronger in
colour than is typical at Bras lia, whose ofcial buildings are generally white. The
engineering rhetoric here seemed to have no structural basis. Both drums were
structurally identical, yet the one with the concrete crown appeared, misleadingly, to
be suspended or hung. The apparently structural elements were in reality, decorative,
a departure for Niemeyer, whose work has in a residually modernist way tended to
fetishize its structure.
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Fig. 8. Oscar Niemeyer, Museu dos Povos Ind genas, Bras lia, 1982.
The urbanism of the building is also a departure. Unlike all the other major
government buildings, which occupy empty sites as pavilions, this one sits uneasily
between a major highway and a car park, unsure if it wants to dene a site or shrink
from it. Criticism of the building has in fact been widespread. See for example the
interventions from the Catalan architecture critic Eduardo Subirats, normally one of
Niemeyers chief European supporters. I was surprised to discover the postmodern
Niemeyer, Subirats wrote, imitating the rubbish found in the nancial districts of
American cities (Subirats in vitruvius.com, 2002; arcoweb, 2006).
At the time of writing, Niemeyer had just completed two further projects on the
Monumental Axis of a similar scale: a new National Museum, the Museu Nacional
Honestino Guimaraes, and a building for the National Library, the Biblioteca
Nacional Leonel de Moura Brizola, inaugurated together in December 2006
(Figs. 1113). Located adjacent to each other, just to the east of the bus station, they
mark a signicant extension of the planned cultural quarter which, until now, has
only been represented by the National Theatre building, also by Niemeyer. As far as
one could tell in 2006, both buildings indicated a return to a more familiar language.
The Museum was a huge concrete dome with a spiralling ramp, a clear reference to
National Congress. The library was a more straightforward pavilion, perpendicular
to the main avenue. The content of both buildings remained a mystery at the time of
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Fig. 9. Oscar Niemeyer, Procuradoria Geral da Republica, Bras lia, 19952002.
writing, as was their relation to their respective institutions in Rio de Janeiro. And in
terms of scale, both involved a major alteration to the Monumental Axis. The huge
dome of the Museum, in particular, seems likely to overshadow the modest and
delicate cathedral (Chester, 2006). Although long planned, this may be another case,
like the Memorial da America Latina in Sao Paulo (1988) in which Niemeyers
talents as an architect have not been sufciently held in check by an urbanist. As
Zein wrote of that project, the chief problem was the absence of Costas disciplined
urbanism to give its exuberant forms some meaning (Zein, 1989, p. 72).
3.3. Braslia Shopping
I will reserve judgement on Niemeyers latest work, although it is worth saying

that it seems to mark the greatest revision to the visual character of the Pilot Plan
since 1960: nothing else built since then has had the same impact on the views along
the Monumental Axis as the new museum. Up until now however, the greatest
impact on the Pilot Plan has been from private developers rather than the state,
who have built extensively in the Hotel Sectors either side of the Monumental
Axis near the bus station. These sectors are now dominated by such development,
very little of which bar the survival of such relics as the Hotel Nacional
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Fig. 10. Oscar Niemeyer, Procuradoria Geral da Republica (detail), Bras lia, 19952002.
(Nauro Esteves, 1960) corresponds to the modernism of the original plan. Consider
one such building in particular, Bras lia Shopping, a huge retail mall in the North
Hotel Sector (Figs. 1415). This was designed in 1991 by the Sao Paulo-based
architect Ruy Ohtake (born 1938), a Brazilian of Japanese origin. His work has been
increasingly prominent in Brazil: he has been responsible for a number of highly
visible commercial developments in his home city, including the Renaissance Hotel
(1998), the Ohtake Cultural (2003), both among the tallest structures in the city, as
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Fig. 11. Oscar Niemeyer, Museu Nacional Honestino Guimaraes, Bras lia, 2006.
Fig. 12. Oscar Niemeyer, Biblioteca Nacional Leonel de Moura Brizola, Bras lia, 2006.
well as the remarkable Hotel Unique (1998), an improbable port-holed half-moon,

suspended horizontally between two concrete slabs.
Ohtakes work is nothing if not spectacular. The two towers cited above are
not only among Sao Paulos tallest buildings but among its most colourful.
Both have arresting facades made up of reective panels arranged in stripes. The
effect is graphic in the extreme: the buildings have the impact of the most
demonstrative advertising. The use of colour is the major point of departure from the
modernist generation, whose work, wherever it originated in Brazil, made a fetish of
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Fig. 13. Oscar Niemeyer, Museu Nacional Honestino Guimaraes and Biblioteca Nacional Leonel de
Moura Brizola, Bras lia, 2006.
Fig. 14. Ruy Ohtake, Bras lia Shopping, Bras lia, 1991.
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Fig. 15. Ruy Ohtake, Bras lia Shopping (detail), Bras lia, 1991.
structure; colour-wise, with the major exception of Lina Bo Bardis work, the
buildings tended to take up the surrounding colour of the location. Besides
colour, Ohtakes work also clearly differentiates between fac- ade and structure. The
spectacular character of Ohtake Cultural, for example, derives not from the structure
which is that of a modernist slab but the surface detailing, not just the colour, but
its reectivity and curving forms. What we are dealing with is a spectacularity of
surface, a two-dimensional quality, which is fundamentally graphic in character.
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This character is emphasized further by the choice of materials for the fac- ade, which
are designed specically to resist ageing. Unlike the concrete favoured by the
modernists, which rapidly and visibly ages, Ohtakes reective panels will always
look new.
I resist the use of the term postmodern in this context, because it makes little sense
in a country which has experienced no comparable loss of faith in the modernist
project found in (for example) the United States, and which continues, at least in
public buildings, to hold Modernism in high regard. But Ohtakes work has much in
common with American postmodernism, even if it should not be theorized in the
exact same terms: unlike the work of Niemeyer and his contemporaries, Ohtakes
occludes structure, makes the building envelope spectacular, makes historical or
contextual references, and avoids any kind of social programme. Like American
postmodernism it is an architecture of surfaces.
This difference is important to bear in mind when considering the effect of
Ohtakes work in Bras lia. Here is the modernist city par excellence, where what
spectacularity there is, is a result of the exacerbation of structure above all think of
Niemeyers cathedral, whose concrete ribs are the building, or Lucio Costas bus
station, in which the stacking of simple functions ends up creating an extraordinary
image (Fig. 16). Furthermore, this is a city whose social programme is legible
everywhere, and in contrast to almost anywhere else in Brazil where the
operation of consumer capital occupies a furtive and uneasy place. In the middle of
all this we nd a vast and demonstrative mall, whose bizarre forms demand attention
from everywhere close to the bus station. Bras lia Shopping is found in the northern
Hotel sector, just to one side of the Monumental Axis, between the bus station and
the TV tower, a strategic location. It is big by any standards, 105,000 m2 in
total including the ofces (http://www.brasiliashopping.com.br, 2006) In form it
consists of two fourteen storey towers, clad in navy-blue reective glass. The towers
themselves are fat but elliptical, like quartered cheeses. They are separated by a gap
of some 100 m, but linked at the top by a tubular ofce section, which presents a
circular aspect when seen straight on. The imagery is highly allusive without being
specic. From the side, this is a giant, vaulted building that oddly recalls much
poorer structures: the simple, low-cost housing built by the Arquitectura Nova
group around Sao Paulo in the 1960s, for example, while British readers might think
of Second World War Nissen huts, built in huge quantity for the army. From either
end, the circular form rising through the towers alludes for anyone who knows
Bras lia to the moment every year when the sun rises between the twin towers of the
Congress building, a moment now freighted with alleged mystical signicance
(Bellos, 1999).
Most visitors to the centre come to see only the rst two storeys, the mall of
18,500 m2, which forms a podium upon which the ofce towers are situated. The mall
is impressively large, built around a central atrium, through which the buildings
vertiginous exterior can be glimpsed. It contains space for 180 shops distributed over
the two oors (http://www.brasiliashopping.com.br, 2006); it is fully air-conditioned;
it has a big food court; it is anchored by a big department store (Lojas Americanas)
and a branch of McDonalds. It is evidently successful, with 35,000 visitors per day,
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Fig. 16. Lucio Costa, Bus Station, Bras lia, 1960.
far in excess of any cultural or political institution in the city. And its visitors are, it
needs to be said, from the wealthiest sector of the citys population: three quarters,
say the malls owners, come from the two highest socio-economic groups (A and B),
and the majority of them are young. Over half fall into the 2340 age group (http://
www.brasiliashopping.com.br, 2006).
Outside once again. Bras lia Shopping is an isolated pavilion. Unlike the Ministry
buildings on the Monumental Axis, however, it makes no concession to landscaping
in its surroundings. This may be a spectacular structure but it is, like any suburban
shopping mall, fundamentally isolated from its surroundings at detail level
surrounded by acres of surface car parking, rather chaotically organized. Neither
does it make any concession to urbanism. In the southern hotel sector close by, there
are examples of early buildings that make important gestures towards place: the
Hotel Nacional, for example, one of the rst hotels in the city, is a slab anchored at
ground level by a short, semi-covered street containing a cluster of travel agencies
and a coffee bar. The hotels cavernous lobby blends seamlessly into this. It is an
urban place, if not always a wholly successful one.
At Bras lia Shopping on the other side of the Monumental Axis, there is no such
concession to place. Here the dark glass simply reects the observer; there are no
openings apart from the main ones; the relation to the surrounding street is blunt.
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One is either in or out. For readers of postmodern architectural theory, many aspects
of it (scale, relation to surroundings, spectacularity, fetishization of the ceiling)
will recall John Portmans Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, the subject
of a widely read critique by the cultural theorist Fredric Jameson (Leach, 1997,
pp. 238246, commentary in Williams, 2004, pp. 910).
It is all a marked contrast with the early public buildings of Bras lia, which were
always surrounded at ground level by a basic service infrastructure small shops,
coffee bars, newsstands. It is an infrastructure which generally persists. At Bras lia
Shopping, there is a more brutal separation between inside and outside on a model
that, whatever the claims of the architect and the developer to respond the forms of
the city, has much less in common with Bras lia than it does with suburban
California or Florida. Indeed, it is the largely unconscious referencing of the world
outside Bras lia that probably contributes to its success. The socioeconomic groups
targeted by the development identify, it is certain, more readily with American forms
of consumer capitalism than they do with the redistributive social project of
Bras lias designers. And it has to be said that Ohtakes building, like his other
projects for the wealthy in Sao Paulo, is impressive in providing an image of the
circulation of capital, highly appropriate for a country that has since the end of
military rule in 1984 increasingly adopted neoliberal economic policies (see also the
argument in Castells, 1996). Bras lia as originally designed had no such spaces. It
had few areas in which shopping might take place, and the majority of those were
small scale and unspectacular: Lucio Costa, in the competition submission for the
city, imagined shopping as a minor activity that would take place, along with certain
kinds of informal socialization, in the small shopping areas of the residential wings,
small, decidedly functional structures, subordinate in every way to the superquadrada
(Costa, 1957). Braslia Shopping is, by contrast, subordinate to nothing. It is a vast,
demonstrative building, all spectacle as it were. And its spectacle is dependent on its
being resolutely unlike Bras lia, or Brazil, whatever the play the developers make to
its relation to the existing architecture of the city. This is a touristic fantasy. Once
inside, past security, one is in a mall that might be anywhere in the developed world.
It is by any standards a wealthy place, and is comfortable and well serviced. You do
not see the poor, who are otherwise visible everywhere in the city. Its clientele is well-
off by any standards. It presents, to invoke Castellss theory of the space of ows,
an important image of the circulation of capital. Here is a space that both looks, and
is, connected to global capital. Here one could be anywhere rich, and that is precisely
its appeal, and the cause of its evident success (Castells, 1996, pp. 412421,
commentary Williams, 2004, pp. 185187).
Bras lia Shopping is the largest and most spectacular addition to the Pilot Plan
before the recent interventions by Niemeyer. A few other interventions might be
noted. On the Monumental Axis, there is a very large convention centre between the
TV tower, and the Museu dos Povos Ind genas. This vast, low box has the
disconcerting form of a bow tie on its surface; like Bras lia Shopping it is an
architecture of surfaces, made up of the same reective panels. The ongoing
development of the housing in the North Wing has also, as El-Dahdah has noted,
involved some departures from the original form of the Plan (El-Dahdah, 2005).
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The so-called Babylonia shopping centre, much criticized by Holston, is a clear

departure from the principles of the Plan, envisaged not as a neighbourhood
shopping area subordinate to the surrounding residential blocks, but a centre in its
own right, whose outward, faintly Moorish, forms are in effect a form of advertising
(Holston, 1989, pp. 142143). The superblocks themselves have also developed in
form in recent years, becoming much more like speculatively built housing in any
other Brazilian city. The height restrictions have generally been adhered to, so the
blocks remain almost exclusively slabs of four to six storeys. But the treatment of the
facades has become much more elaborate: reective glass, often brightly coloured, is
much in evidence; balconies (never part of the original blocks) are now frequent,
although often sealed; the sales literatures for the new blocks allude to places
elsewhere, not Bras lia; one is being sold a fantasy; Bras lia itself does not have much
sales appeal (El-Dahdah, 2005). There have been other innovations in the form of
the new superquadras too, underground parking, and revisions to the treatment of
open space.
The Pilot Plan nevertheless retains most of its original integrity despite these
interventions. Revisions to the road network, for example, have been strongly
resisted although they might make for a more humane city (Holanda, 2000).
UNESCO status, along with local protections, has produced an urban landscape
that has evolved remarkably little since 1960. The Monumental Axis has barely
changed at all since then, and the changes to the south wing of the residential axis are
remarkably few, bar the reversal of the entrances to the retail units. The real changes
to the city are, as we shall see in the next section, all outside the Pilot Plan.
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CHAPTER 4
Beyond the Pilot Plan
4.1. Introduction
Imagine a city planned in every respect as a centre politically, economically,

culturally in which the idea of a periphery had no meaning, a city in which all
human activity was foreseen, present and visible as part of the core. Lucio Costa
declared: the growth of favelas, whether on the city outskirts or in the surrounding
countryside, should at all costs be prevented (Costa in Holston, 1989, p. 257)
(Fig. 17). Imagine then the realization of this city, in which an unplanned periphery
appears almost immediately, expands to form a circle of sprawl over 100 km in
diameter, and counting nine-tenths of its population: a city in other words that has
become, in spite of all intentions to the contrary, all periphery. This is Bras lia, at
least in the imagination of many architectural critics. Zein, writes, for example:
The periphery of Bras lia begins at the crossing of the Monumental Axis with
the Residential Axis, at the bus station which is a void in any case and therefore
not full of life. The periphery of Bras lia continues 20 km beyond that, separated
by a belt which is ever more occupied, both legally and illegally (Zein, 2003,
p. 103).
In this account, the city is no longer dened by its centre, which in any case, Zein
thinks, has dissolved into insignicance. But crucially, Zein thinks that this is not in
itself a defect, nor is it a quality, rather it is the basic condition of our cities. So
Taguatinga, the capitals biggest satellite, is in her view by no means a peripheral
place but the equal of many other vibrant medium-sized Brazilian cities (Zein, 2003,
p. 103).
Zeins view is to some extent rhetorical, but it is supported in large part by recent
research on Bras lia, which describes it no longer in terms of the architecture of the
Monumental Axis, but as a metropolis. In this scenario, the Pilot Plan itself becomes
structurally, if not symbolically, marginal. As Wright and Turkienicz argued in 1988,
the Pilot Plan was becoming a small, sophisticated, suburb of a megalopolis oriented
around two former satellites: a Hampstead of the planalto (Wright and Turkienicz,
1988, p. 364). Zeins acceptance of Bras lias de facto dissolution is nevertheless an
unusual view. Most commentators either repress the citys periphery (because of, for
example, its lack of architectural interest) or they demand its removal. Both views
are common, and both represent a desire for the periphery to dissolve or disappear.
What I show in the last part of this paper, elaborating Zeins view, is that Bras lias
periphery in large part is the city, and how it requires understanding, not dismissal,
for the city to make much sense at all. I also argue that it is often through the visual
realm that the periphery can be understood, that it is through pictures that anxieties
about the periphery are communicated, but also principally how a new and afuent
periphery has been created.
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Brasilia's Population
Administrative Population Population Growth

Region (1) in 1996 (2) in 2000 (3) 2000/1996 (%)
Braslia 199,020 198,422 -0.3
Gama 121,630 130,580 7.4
Taguatinga 221,250 243,575 10.1
Brazlndia 47,720 52,698 10.4
Sobradinho 101,090 128,789 27.4
Planaltina 115,830 147,114 27.0
Parano 47,160 54,902 16.4
Ncleo Bandeirante 31,200 36,472 16.9
Ceilndia 342,830 344,039 0.4
Guar 102,910 115,385 12.1
Cruzeiro 55,730 63,883 14.6
Samambaia 157,400 164,319 4.4
Santa Maria 87,750 98,679 12.5
So Sebastio 44,180 64,322 45.6
Recanto das Emas 51,990 93,287 79.4
Lago Sul 28,410 28,137 -1.0
Riacho Fundo 21,370 41,404 93.7
Lago Norte 25,700 29,505 14.8
Candangolndia 13,830 15,634 13.0
TOTAL 1,817,000 2,051,146 12.9
Fig. 17. Population of the Federal District by city, 2000. Table adapted from www.geocities.com. The
information it contains is based on the last ofcial census, carried out in 2000 by the Instituto Brasileiro de
Geograa e Estatistica (IGBE). No more up to date information is currently available. It should be noted
that the Federal District was reorganised into nine new administrative units during 20022005 replacing
those listed here.
Bras lias periphery is of far more than local interest. The citys design excluded
the very notion of a periphery, and yet a periphery appeared from the start and has
been from that point always greater in geographical and population terms than the
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centre. This paradox exemplies the contradictions in modernist urbanism, of which

Bras lia was perhaps the most spectacular example. Similarly, the negative reactions
to the explosion of the citys periphery identify major contradictions and anxieties in
professional practice that are of universal concern: the alarm about the periphery,
the fear of it, and the desire to see it eradicated are all feelings expressed
internationally, and as such deserve exploration. The reality of Bras lia represents for
many prominent gures in the architectural profession internationally their worst
fears. What I do here is a step towards the analysis of the architectural profession,
done through and examination of those fears. Why these things should have been
felt, and why such violence should have been done in their name is about much more
than the Brazilian capital. I discuss rst the periphery as an idea, as manifest in
architectural and allied discourses. Secondly, I provide an introduction to the
discourse around Bras lias periphery, in particular its characterization as a place of
violence, loss of control and disorder. Thirdly, I explore the sublimation of the
periphery in recent years through the emergence of new satellites, in particularly
Aguas Claras.
4.2. The politics of the periphery
The periphery is a geographical location, but it is also, ineluctably, an expression

of value. In modern discourses about the urban, to be peripheral is rarely positive:
periphery carries connotations of low economic value, of social or political
marginality, of aesthetic poverty, of loss of control, of fragmentation, dissolution
or waste. The periphery of cities is so often linked with notions of disorder or
violence: at the time of writing (autumn, 2006) there could not have been a clearer
example of this than in the debate about the renewed violence in the Parisian
banlieue, a part of the city now inescapably dened by violence. What notions of
periphery can be deployed in respect of Bras lia?
Anglophone literatures are especially rich on the question of the periphery,
perhaps because the cities in English-speaking cultures have been readier than those
elsewhere to embrace the city as polynucleic or suburban. There are numerous well-
known attempts to dene the periphery in positive terms, based more often than not
on the experience of the urbanization of the western United States. In the 1960s and
early 1970s this generally has a polemical dimension, sometimes directly hostile to
the values of modernist architects and urbanists. In this category could be cited
Melvin Webbers Explorations into Urban Structure (1964), Reyner Banhams Los
Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971) or Venturi and Scott-Browns
Learning from Las Vegas (1972). All, in different ways, were relaxed about the
radically suburban character of the American metropolis. For Webber, the outward
form mattered little as long as the metropolis could still frame complex cultural and
economic activity. Hence his concept, the non-place urban realm, in which the
traditional notion of city dissolved into a network of modern communication
systems, all peripheral to any traditional notion of city. There have been more recent
apologists for the suburban metropolis, often writing in response to the fashionable
revivals of neo-traditional urbanism. Peter G. Rowe made a detailed exploration of
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the form of the suburban metropolis in Making the Middle Landscape (1991). Lars
Lerup wrote a celebrated account of contemporary Houston in After the City (2000)
which is as much a document of the authors personal coming to terms with the
suburban metropolis, as it is of the metropolis itself. Robert Bruegmanns widely
read Sprawl: A Compact History (2005) takes a historical view, locating the suburban
metropolis as one stage in a longer process that leads to things later regarded as
indubitably urban: most of London, for example. Some of this Anglophone
literature is informed by an aesthetics of sprawl that has essentially artistic origins. It
coincides, for example, with T.J. Clarks revisionist art history of Impressionism, The
Painting of Modern Life (1985), in which avant-garde French art is represented as a
vehicle for transforming the urban periphery into the centre; the urban processes that
obsessed the Impressionists were the prototype, thinks Clark, of the urban processes
seen on the fringes of all American cities in the 20th century. The revision of sprawl
has aesthetic connections too with the work of Robert Smithson and other artists of
1960s New York, many of whom were obsessed with urban processes, thrilling to the
notion of the city as undifferentiated sprawl. Smithsons imagery of New York as a
vast metropolitan system is a good, if often ironic, counterpart to the work of
academics such as Webber (see, for example Smithson, 1979).
From Webber to Breugmann, via Smithson, this Anglophone history rejects an
urbanism of centre-periphery relations, in favour of one that is polycentric,
heterogeneous, and deantly suburban. In Banham (1971) and elsewhere there is
detectable pleasure when the traditional city can be seen to crumble: Banhams
delight in the decay of downtown LA is perfectly clear, a direct contrast with the
vibrancy of the surrounding region. To an extent, similar literatures can be found on
Bras lia. Frederico de Holandas work has long been metropolitan in focus, and his
remarks on the vibrancy of Taguatinga have something of the character of Banhams
on some previously unacknowledged part of Los Angeles.
There are also deep historical roots for a metropolitan view of Bras lia, or at least
one that abandoned notions of centre and periphery. The great Brazilian sociologist
Gilberto Freyre, for example, wrote extensively about the distinctive patterns of
settlement found in Brazil, arguing throughout his career for an understanding of the
country founded not on cities on the European model, but rural plantations on the
one hand, and a frontier mentality on the other. As he pointed out in a lecture given
in the United States in the 1920s, both settlement cultures had close equivalents in
the United States (Freyre, 2001). But Brazils plantation culture was based around
sugar cane, not cotton, and its frontier culture (for example the 19th century
bandeirantes, who opened up the interior of what is now Sao Paulo state) tended to
co-operate with, and even identify with indigenous peoples, rather than set itself in
opposition to them. The plantation culture, Freyre argued, was based around a big
house, the casa grande, around which was organized a complex settlement, including
slave quarters and places for worship. As he pointed out on various occasions, the
casa grande, not the town, was the principal unit of Brazilian civilisation. In marked
contrast to settlements in Hispanic America, Brazils public culture including its
religious culture was weak, and its urban settlements impoverished by contrast
with the wealth and opulence to be found in the plantation. Freyre asserts that it is
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here, and not in the (colonial) city that an authentically Brazilian culture can be
found. The implications of this for contemporary urbanism in Brazil are clear
enough in Freyres 1961 essay, Brasil, Brasis, Braslia. An attack on most aspects of
the new capital, it objects in particular to the citys explicitly urban form. An image
of mans conquest over nature, it could have been built in the image of the
plantation, which for all its contradictions and inequalities, was an image of an
alternative form of settlement, a rurban settlement of low density, in which people
and nature lived in more equal relation with each other (Freyre, 1961, p. 160).
Freyres understanding of Brazilian settlement makes sense in relation to the
countrys two great metropoles, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, both of which are
properly polycentric, largely indifferent to the public realm (with the great exception
of the beach of Rios zona sul) and haphazardly organized. Whilst among the worlds
greatest settlements in terms of size and economic inuence, they are urbanistically
weak, with major expressions of wealth and authority manifest in the private rather
than the public realm (for a discussion of this in relation to Sao Paulo, see Caldeira
2000). Bras lia, I suggest, remains different. It may be becoming a metropolis, and is
certainly polycentric, but it continues to be organized symbolically, politically and
culturally around a historic centre-periphery opposition. As the discussion of
UNESCO status has shown, such a relationship even has legal status. It is a concept
that still strongly informs local discourses about the city, from both positive and
negative perspectives. Lauro Cavalcanti notes with barely concealed dismay in 2006
that the citys most vibrant quarters are what are essentially suburban shopping
malls, architecturally poor, secondary parts of the city that are barely urban at all
(Cavalcanti, 2006, p. 222). Zein, by contrast, regards the city as essentially
peripheral, but presents this as its essential nature rather than something that must
be corrected (Zein, 2003, p. 103). Her use of the term periphery is important,
however, implying the continuation of a centre to which it stands in relation. It is the
persistence of the centre-periphery opposition in local literatures that leads me to
persist with it here. Bras lia may be on the road to becoming the suburban
metropolis on the southern Californian model, but it is not there yet.
4.3. The myth of the Cidade Livre
Bras lia was a product of a western imagination, and as such has always been
subject to western anxieties about the periphery of cities. Its designer, Lucio Costa,
had himself been trained in Europe (in France and England) and had already
collaborated with Le Corbusier on the Ministry of Education and Science (MES)
building in Rio de Janeiro (19371943) (for commentaries on Costas life and work,
see Nobre et al., 2004). He admired both the English garden city, and Le Corbusiers
urbanism, and both interests are explicit in the text for the winning entry. Both
the garden city and Le Corbusiers urbanism were also of course ways of abolishing
the urban periphery. Both demanded that the city take the form of a self-contained
unit of a predetermined size, in which development was controlled, and edges
were well-policed. In both cases, city or town stops abruptly, and a strictly dened
countryside begins.
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So it is with the original Bras lia. The entire city in the original plan was contained
within the 14 km Residential Axis, or the 5 km of the bisecting Monumental Axis.
The concept of a periphery was simply abolished (Holston, 1989, p. 257). The
residential buildings were designed to house everyone regardless of social class, all of
whom would work, one way or another, in or close to the Monumental Axis: the
population of this original design was to be a maximum of 600,000. But when
construction of the city began in 1957, it immediately acquired a large and vibrant
satellite in the form of the Cidade Livre (Free Town), a shanty ofcially permitted
for the duration of construction which housed up to 18,000 and which was for some
years the centre of the capitals economic life (Evenson, 1973, p. 175; Holston, 1989,
p. 265) (Figs. 1820). By 2000, the capital comprised 19 administrative units, only
one of which was the original central city, or Pilot Plan; these units ranged in
population (ofcially) from 13,000 to 344,000. The Pilot Plan was only third in size,
behind two much larger satellites, Taguatinga and Ceilandia, both some 25 km from
the centre (geocities.com, 2006). The total ofcially stated population was slightly
over two million, that is, over three times the size of the planned city; the size of the
city taking into account illegal settlements may be closer to three million. It should
be noted that at the time of writing all but one of these peripheral settlements were
growing fast, in one case by 19% per annum; the two exceptions were Lago Sul, and
most signicantly the Pilot Plan, which has been slowly shrinking for some years,
the result of an ageing population, but also the shifting economic base of the
metropolis, towards the satellite of Taguatinga (geocities.com, 2006).
Fig. 18. Cidade Livre, ca. 1957, postcard. Photographer unknown.

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Fig. 19. Cidade Livre, ca. 1957. Photographer unknown.
If Bras lia has become, inadvertently, all periphery, how is this process perceived
and understood? For the ofcial city, the periphery at Bras lia was long a source of
considerable anxiety. As Epstein, Paviani and Holston described, the early ofcial
response of NOVACAP was brutal: targeted destruction of favelas and forced
resettlement to permitted satellites, far away from the Pilot Plan (Epstein, 1973;
Paviani, 1985, 1987; Holston, 1989). Later responses have been subtler. There is now
an institutionalized belief in the metropolitan region, and post-UNESCO, a positive
enthusiasm for certain metropolitan developments, such as Aguas Claras and the
heavy rail metro (www.novacap.df.com.br, 2007).
However, let us look at the meaning of the periphery rstly through the gure of
the Cidade Livre. The Cidade Livre was to be found some 10 km from the centre of
Bras lia, straddling the main southern highway, the BR040, the road that eventually
forks and leads either to Rio de Janeiro or Sao Paulo. It was established in 1956, at
the same moment as construction began, and it housed at its peak (ofcially) 11,600
people (Zimbres, 1974, p. 103); the similar (but illegal) Vila Sara Kubitschek
(founded 1958) lay close by, while a further settlement, Candangolandia, could be
found just few kilometres to the north. It comprised mostly wooden shacks, arranged
haphazardly, but was a legal settlement, founded by the capitals development
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Fig. 20. Cidade Livre, ca. 1957. Photographer unknown.
company NOVACAP as a temporary camp to service construction, with legal

concessions for banks and businesses, which could as an incentive operate
without paying tax. It was for many years the centre of commercial activity in the
capital (Zimbres, 1974, p. 103).
It had as almost all visitors reported something of the atmosphere of the
cinematic Wild West, a sharp contrast with the order and modernity of the Pilot
Plan. It was nevertheless often represented in romantic terms. Oscar Niemeyer
referred to the period he spent living in Bras lia at the beginning of its construction
as a period of great hardship, and difcult separation from family life in Rio de
Janeiro, but also a quasi-utopia in which physical adversity, analogous to the
conditions of the battleeld, liberated its inhabitants temporarily from the normal
boundaries of social class. His participation in the experience of the construction of
the city was an adventure, not least because of the isolation of the construction site.
Four days drive from Rio de Janeiro along perilous dirt roads, one left unsure if one
would arrive in safety, not knowing, given the difculty of return, when, or even if,
one would see ones family again (Niemeyer, 1961, p. 1819). But in spite of the
harsh conditions, it was an experience of which Niemeyer had like everyone, a fond
memory. It wasnt just a professional opportunity, but something of greater
importance, more of a collective movementy He continued: there was something
about the nature of the collective hardship that produced a ghting spirit (y) that
levelled everyone, a natural afnity that made class differences (y) almost
impossible to establish (Niemeyer, 1961, pp. 910). The Cidade Livre was an
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essential part of this experience of social levelling; more than that, perhaps, it was its
symbol:
we would go out to the Cidade Livre, attracted by its wild-west atmosphere.

We normally went, by choice, to Olgas Bar, where a clientele of exotic
appearance amused themselves, dancing animatedly in a state of euphoria
produced by alcohol, in boots dirty with mud, in the middle of the hubbub of
those sitting around. There occurred the most bizarre scenes, and unexpected
brawls (Niemeyer, 1961, 23).
For Niemeyer in fact, it was precisely the nights of cachac- a-fuelled entertainment
in the Cidade Livre, not the ofcial city, that materialized the dream of a classless
utopia, where each man, regardless of his social origins, could feel he had a place in
the city (see also Williams, 2005, p. 130). This dream was momentarily realized
during the construction or at least in Niemeyers memory of it in a way that never
came to pass in the formal housing projects which remained, and remain, decisively
segregated (Qunito and Iwakawi, 1991, p. 56). As the construction progressed, and
the city became more formal (and, as we shall see, the existence of the Cidade Livre
came under ofcial scrutiny) this utopian moment passed. Niemeyer said of the
period towards the end of his involvement that the city had changed, that he and his
colleagues became overly concerned with their clothes and other supercial matters,
and the liberatory character of the early months had been lost. They remained
optimists he stated they believed that the utopian society they had briey
experienced during Bras lias construction would ultimately be realized in a
permanent form but this is, it has to be said, a somewhat unconvincing declaration
(Niemeyer, 1961, pp. 6365).
Niemeyer was by no means the only one to promote the myth of the Cidade
Livre. It is encountered at all levels, many clearly found in the settlement
conditions that were hard and lacking in amenity, but also a place that could be
productive of pleasure. The presidents visits to the Cidade Livre, sometimes to
eat at a restaurant (the Restaurante JK) named after him, were legendary,
albeit calculated, gestures by a president who well understood their political
value (Silva, 1971, p. 231). One former resident described the lack of light, the
lack of water, the unpaved roads and the dust but also a sense of community
where no one locked their doors, life was good, people were happy (Bicalho de
Sousa in Paviani, 1991, p. 178). It is also a frequent apparition in accounts
of early Bras lia by foreign visitors. For Simone de Beauvoir, who made a bad-
tempered visit with Jean Paul Sartre in late 1960, the ville livre was the only
place with any life, its wild character making up picturesquely for at least some of
its more obvious deciencies (de Beauvoir, 1963, pp. 579580). Even some of
those observers such as the anthropologist David Epstein who were ultimately
critical of the construction of Bras lia, were nevertheless warmly disposed to
peripheral settlements such as these, nding in them effective communities, networks
of social support, and organization mostly lacking in the Pilot Plan (Epstein,
1973, pp. 1725).
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4.4. The anti-myth
The myth of the Cidade Livre had huge appeal. In fact it forms part of a network
of myths around the city, strongly relating, for example, to the myth of the candango,
the itinerant worker labouring the fabled 36 hours a day, for pure enthusiasm
(Holston, 1989, pp. 229232). But those who promoted the myths of the periphery
did not do so innocently; for those in authority, the myth of the Cidade Livre was a
useful means of compensating for its undoubted brutality. And almost all of those
who saw something positive in the place also had the means of escape, if not always
immediately. Niemeyers enjoyment of Olgas Bar is in large part that of the tourist;
he would eventually return to his comfortable life in Rio de Janeiros afuent zona
sul. The myth of the Cidade Livre was carefully contrived, folklore, in the end
pure deception, according to the architect Sergio Ferro (Ferro, 2006, p. 306). Ferro,
whose Marxism was far less compromised than Niemeyers, might be expected to
regard Bras lia in this way, especially in retrospect (his remarks were made in a 2003
interview). But his writings on Bras lia make clear that the experience of its
construction was in large part the source of his radicalism, and as it turns out, his
counter-myth of Bras lia is now much more characteristic of the discourse around
the city as a whole.
In the counter-myth, the Cidade Livre represents not liberation, but incarceration.
Its workers camps are de facto prisons, its inhabitants oppressed, and its violence
not picturesque or comic, but life-threatening. In this scenario, the periphery is a
place of exceptional danger. As a way of framing these remarks, it might be worth
considering the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agambens concept of the camp, a place,
as he puts it, of exception inside which human beings become biological entities for
whom any concept of right has dissolved; they are pure bodies subject to the control
of the camp authorities. The individual in the camp exists only in a state of exile.
Agamben describes the concentration camp as the key gure of this idea in modern
times, but argues, provocatively, that the camp is a quintessentially modern space
and that many spaces in the contemporary world have its characteristics (Agamben,
1998). Bulent Diken has used Agambens concept in relation to the depiction of the
favela in Fernando Meirelless movie City of God: if anything, it works better here, as
the camp is not metaphorical, but literal (Diken, 2005). Many of the spaces of early
Bras lia can be described in these terms: the work camps organized to facilitate its
construction, obviously, but also places such as the Cidade Livre, in which the
normal conventions of urban life were temporarily suspended, and the existence of
its inhabitants subject to the whims of unpredictable and often violent authority.
The counter-myth can be said to have two aspects: the physical character of the
peripheral settlements, and their violence. Physically, these were dreadful places, as
everyone knew. For Niemeyer, the dreadfulness of the surroundings facilitated a
kind of alcoholically-assisted redemption. For most, however, these were places of
despair, and the endless accounts of them recall Engels on early industrial
Manchester (Engels, 1993, pp. 3686). The Cidade Livre had grown in a disordered
fashion, becoming no less than a human ant-heap comprised of thousands of
shacks piled on top of each other without the least urban infrastructure (Quinto and
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Iwakawi, 1991, p. 60). Problems of sanitation were extreme. David Epstein, who
lived for a time in the comparable settlement of Seguridade Social, described a range
of alarming health hazards: no running water, washing of clothes done in a local
stream, infestations of rats in local shops and markets (Epstein, 1973, p. 106). As
regards the disposal of waste:
Garbage is burned, buried or thrown into the street or down the deep gully that
cuts into Main St. Dogs and chickens scavengeysewage is largely disposed of
in home-dug pits in the backyards, which may account for the luxuriance of
many of the gardens, as well as the high incidence of gastro-intestinal disease
(Epstein, 1973, p. 167).
If disease in these places was one threat to survival, so was re. Gustavo Ribeiro
wrote of frequent res demanding that entire wings of shacks be demolished to
prevent the re consuming large part of the town (Quinto and Iwakawi, 1991, p. 60).
Simone de Beauvoir, on arrival in Cidade Livre in 1960, witnessed the aftermath of a
major re, a common occurrence: the wood, she noted, in such a dry climate, burned
quickly. On arriving for a visit with Sarte, one part of the settlement had just been
destroyed. There were no victims, she said, but debris and wreckage, blackened
furniture, scraps of metal, torn open mattresses (de Beauvoir, 1963, p. 580). Even
the more formalized settlements had immense problems of sanitation. Certain
sectors of Taguatinga might only have water, from standpipes, for a few hours a day,
or as at Brazlandia, water during the rainy season might be so contaminated with
mud as to be unusable. From the beginning, the city arguably had a sanitary ring
around it, with developed world conditions in the centre, and third world conditions
outside (Gonzales, 1985, p. 86).
In all of these impressions, disease, and re, and general dereliction do not make
for a scene that can be easily recuperated into the picturesque. One or two places by
night, such as Olgas Bar, might be described in this way, but these accounts present
a picture of the Cidade Livre and other settlements like it as horrors, places that by
their nature threaten their inhabitants through their physical degradation as much as
they also provide shelter.
But it is the question of violence that most challenges the myth of the Cidade
Livre: this was an exceptionally dangerous place, both in terms of internally
generated violence and the activities of the authorities. The Cidade Livre was subject
to state-sanctioned violence of exceptional severity. For Niemeyer and his circle, the
brawls in Olgas bar helped cultivate the atmosphere of the wild west. But for critics
of the project, they were evidence of a response to social repression. Among the most
important of these critics was Ferro, an architect who built a number of housing
projects in the city while still a student at the University of Sao Paulo. As
architecture, the buildings were nothing special, and later disparaged by their author
(Ferro, 2006, p. 305). But while in Bras lia, he became conscious of the poor working
conditions endured by building site labourers, and as an architect his unwitting
role in perpetuating such conditions. The general conditions on the sites involved
poor pay, uncertain food, but also a series of controls meant to maintain authority.
Ferro wrote of meeting former labourers on the capitals construction sites later in
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the 1960s when he was himself imprisoned by the military regime on political
grounds:
I lived with workers who participated in that construction. They told me of a
suffering that we understood poorly then: numerous suicides, workers throwing
themselves under trucks, dysentery almost every day, surrounded, without being
able to leave (Ferro, 2006, p. 305).
The Cidade Livre, in his view, was pure myth. Meanwhile, the violence of the
construction sites was carefully suppressed by the news media, anxious to present a
positive image of the city (Ferro, 2006, p. 306). Ferro went to numerous meetings
between builders and politicians and noted the difference in tone between what was
said publicly, and what was said in private. For Ferro, Bras lias construction was a
system of organized repression, which for him was most clearly represented in the
construction of the most iconic buildings. The cathedral involved workers swinging
about the concrete ribs like circus artistes, while masons polishing marble were
developing silicosis among the clouds of dust (Ferro, 2006, p. 310). Or the Chamber
of Deputies, the upturned bowl at the Congress buildings: here, a highly complex
network of steel rods was used as the basis of the upturned bowl; as the structure was
tied, the steel would catch and crush workers bodies, injuring indiscriminately it
was extraordinarily painful to erect this aesthetically dubious structure (Ferro,
2006, p. 314) (Fig. 21). He argued too that the violence of the construction per se was
underwritten by controls in the work camps themselves designed at preventing
insurrection; Bras lia at this stage was therefore understood as an inherently violent
place that could only function by repressive means.
The system of repression in the work camps has been elaborated by Ribeiro. He
notes the unusual character of the work camp, its nature as an essentially temporary,
nomadic settlement, and also its gender balance, an average of 179 men per female,
factors, one might speculate, that might be productive of violence by themselves. The
layout of camps tended not to provide very different material facilities for different
social classes, but the geographical location of workers in relation to managers was
signicant: administrative ofces would be kept near male dormitories to exercise
control, barbed wire partitions would be introduced between different parts of the
camp, and a guard would invigilate entrances and exits to the camp. Particular
vigilance was extended to the canteen, the only place, he argues, where the body of
workers would perceive itself as a collective, a reservoir of potential power (Ribeiro,
1991, pp. 3240). The camp, Ribeiro writes, was a system of control, a total
institution, analogous (here he draws on the work of the sociologist Erving
Goffman) to both prisons and concentration camps, within whose boundaries
inhabitants are subject to a life that is totally regulated (Ribeiro, 1991, pp. 4650).
A further, related form of repression is constituted by the simple arrangement
of the city. Responding to the need to regulate satellite cities, one of the
governments responses was to re-house illegal settlers in legal settlements far from
the centre of the city. This is the case with Taguatinga, some 25 km from the centre,
founded in 1958 as an attempt to displace the illegal settlement of Vila Sarah
Kubitschek. From the start,
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Fig. 21. Oscar Niemeyer, National Congress, Bras lia, under construction, ca. 1959. Photograph by
Marcel Gautherot.
the government segregated, physically and socially the working classes to the
distant and badly equipped satellites, developing at the same time a politics of
social control by means of the distance that separates the satellites from the
Pilot Plan and by the plans of such satellites (Gouvea, 1991, p. 77, pp. 8384).
It was a policy that in effect continued the Haussmanian tendency of Brazilian

cities to displace their poverty to the outskirts, while remaking their centres as sites
of symbolic control (Gouvea, 1995, p. 77). The violence Gouvea, and Ferro and
Ribeiro write of is mostly, it could be said, Foucauldian: they allude to systems of
control in which violence is implicit rather than explicit, a threat rather than an
actuality. But acts of real violence were also very common, including those by the
state using quasi-military resources at its disposal. Epstein describes the attempted
removal of Seguridade Social in 1968 by the police by removing the roofs of
dwellings, an act of state violence that made them instantly uninhabitable (Epstein,
1973, p. 116). But that pales besides the actions of the Federal Districts police force,
the Guarda Especial de Bras lia (Special Guard of Bras lia), recruited from the
most aggressive police in the surrounding state of Goias. Their most notorious
action occurred in February 1959, when they responded to a group of workers
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demands for better working conditions with the so-called massacre of Pacheco
Fernandes, named after one of the leaders of the supposed rebellion (Figs. 21
and 22). Men were machine-gunned in their beds, and the many bodies removed in
garbage trucks to unmarked graves in the vicinity of Planaltina (Ribeiro, 1991, p. 44;
Gouvea, 1995, p. 63).
In summary, two views of Bras lias periphery predominate: one is a romantic
view, in which places such as the Cidade Livre exist in a happy state of nature, a
picturesque settlement which frames pleasures unobtainable, or not permitted,
elsewhere, a semi-legal concession, a place of semi-licensed carnivalesque disorder.
This view is offset by a much more widely held understanding of the periphery
as the counter-Bras lia: a monstrous, irrational sprawl that has all but engulfed the
planned city, a place of fear and to be feared, with its origins in workers camps full
of alien men; a place of exception (to cite Agambens sense) in which the normal
rules of civil society can be disregarded or suspended, a place of violence of all kinds,
done by and to its inhabitants both by other inhabitants and the state, and a place,
nally, which cannot be brought into the realm of architecture and architectural
history.
Fig. 22. Oscar Niemeyer, National Congress, Bras lia, under construction, ca. 1959. Photograph by
Marcel Gautherot.
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4.5. Aguas Claras: the sublimation of the periphery
We have been dealing thus far with a range of perceptions which colour the
discourses around the periphery; in Anglophone discourse about Bras lias periphery
insofar as it exists at all it is the negative perception of it that easily dominates.
Nowhere is there a sense that parts of the periphery have somehow become normal,
suburban, accessible, open to interrogation. This has perhaps to do with the age of
the existing research, which often describes a periphery that no longer exists. It may
also have to do with a marked anti-suburban bias in several sources, in which the
periphery can only exist as an object of disgust. What I want to do in the last part of
this chapter is to look at the case of Aguas Claras, a middle-class suburb some 20 km
from the Pilot Plan. Here is a case which shows how the city in the ofcial
imagination not only increasingly includes the periphery, but sublimates it, for here
is, increasingly, the headquarters of the citys middle class.
Architects and architectural historians have been reluctant to pay attention to the
periphery of Bras lia at all, given that it exists as an apparent negation of the planned
city; even where (as in Zein) a critic has acknowledged the importance of the
periphery, there is little discussion of its specic nature. The work of Frederico de
Holanda is one exception to this: his O Espac- o de Excec- ao imagines the city in
holistic terms and is open-minded about the possibility of urban life existing in places
other than the centre. The study treats the Federal District as a single entity, and
explores the multiple spaces in which urbanity might be found to lie; among
Holandas conclusions is that Taguatinga increasingly is metropolitan in character,
having a diversity of urban functions, a mixture of social classes, an economic centre,
and even a cultural life. It has even become fashionable (Holanda, 2002, p. 357). By
contrast, the Monumental Axis of the Pilot Plan is not urban at all. It is a calculated
negation of the urban, an exceptional space in his description to be compared with
the great religious or ceremonial spaces of the ancient world. The cover image of O
Espac- o de Excec- ao makes this argument explicit by juxtaposing a view of the pre-
Columbian city of Teotihuacan outside Mexico DF, with the Monumental Axis of
Bras lia. Both are spaces that intentionally exclude everyday life in favour of
symbolic activities that conrm the identity of the place. For the most part these are
empty places, set apart from the everyday life of the city. In recognising this
calculatedly non-urban character, giving it, as it were, space to exist as an idea, he
allows the possibility that the periphery might be taken more seriously. He also
allows for a more sophisticated understand of the city by its residents, whose
perceptions can be described on class lines. Middle class inhabitants of Bras lia tend
to be happy to celebrate the emptiness at its centre (Holanda, 2002, p. 361). The
emptiness of Pilot Plan is in some ways as much physical as it is metaphorical, being
one of only two regions of the federal district to register a population decrease in
recent years, a function of a static and ageing population, and the fact that larger
apartments are available on the periphery (geocities.com, Zimbres, 2006).
If the middle class of the Federal District increasingly regards the Pilot Plan as an
exceptional space which one visits, but in which one does not reside, then one of the
places that has beneted is Aguas Claras. This is a suburb ofcially incorporated
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into the federal district in May 2003, but under construction since the early 1990s. It
lies about 15 km to the southwest of the Pilot Plan, and is nominally a satellite of the
much longer-established Taguatingua, now a city of half a million. The incidence of
new construction is remarkable by any standards: it is a forest of cranes. New point
blocks sprout everywhere from the red soil. The city authorities claim 2,500 new
apartments per year where there are not new buildings, there are hoardings for
buildings (www.Aguasclaras.info). It has 40,000 residents, rising by 10,000 or so each
year, and is projected to grow to 240,000 within a decade. In population terms, it will
therefore shortly overtake the stagnant Pilot Plan, while parts of Aguas Claras
already have the scale and density of new development in Sao Paulo or Belo
Horizonte.
It is an astonishing sight, perhaps because it is so unexpected: an enormous new
city springing out of the scrubby cerrado without fanfare, without signature
architects involved, without much, if any, media attention, bar the inevitable
advertisements for the development in the local press (Figs. 2325). To the visitor,
much of this at rst sight is a startling, 21st century reiteration of the original
Bras lia, down to the curving main axes of the masterplan, the modernism of the
buildings, the invocation of grand urban traditions, the still shocking contrast of
modern architecture with mountains of raw, red earth. The visual impression is very
Fig. 23. View of Aguas Claras from metro station, 2005.

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Fig. 24. View of Aguas Claras from BR070 highway, 2006.
strong; it demands attention, regardless of its architectural quality. This is a

spectacular accumulation of capital that must be understood if the city is to make
sense at all. In the following, I draw on John Dickensons remark that research on
Latin American cities has often ignored their most spectacular aspects, in favour of
marginality (Dickenson, 1994, p. 13). I also draw on those few writers who have
taken such landscapes seriously: the work of Sharon Zukin and Teresa Caldeira is of
special importance for my approach (see Zukin, 1991; Caldeira, 2000). My analysis
departs from that of Caldeira in one important respect. In her remarks on Bras lia,
she describes the city as the most segregated in Brazil, because the Pilot Plan is a de
facto gated community, a place of exclusion that substitutes geographical separation
for physical walls. She does not make any distinction between the Pilot Plan and
contemporary settlements on the periphery. I still think such a distinction is worth
making, as we shall see (Caldeira, 2000, pp. 305308).
The origins of Aguas Claras lie in a masterplan commissioned by the Federal
District in 1991 from a Bras lia-based architect Paulo Zimbres (Zimbres, 1991).
Zimbres had been asked to plan a dormitory suburb, but argued instead for the new
settlement to be a dense piece of urbanism in the European tradition, drawing on the
experience of the traditional city centres of Brazilian cities as well as European ones.
He titled the plan, polemically, an exercise in urbanization in the Federal District.
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Fig. 25. Construction on south side of Aguas Claras, 2005.
Like the Pilot Plan, it was a plan on a grand scale, clear, legible, and self-conscious.
In it the city was laid out between two gently curving parallel boulevards 4.5 km in
length, with a heavy rail metro line running underground between them (Fig. 26).
The boulevards would have stores and cultural facilities at ground level, housing
above; there were to be 45 new public squares, plus an ecology park, a network in
other words of new public spaces making a coherent public realm. The plans visual
reference points include the Prac- a de Se in central Sao Paulo, Curitiba, New York,
Milan, and Edinburgh, the latter being the city where Zimbres had studied under
Percy Johnson-Marshall in 19721974 (see Zimbres, 1974). The references also
included the Pilot Plan itself, which Zimbres understood as fundamentally urban,
albeit a place that rarely enacted its urban qualities in a convincing way, except in
exceptional times, such as elections when large crowds might turn out for
demonstrations. Zimbres advocated density, mixed use, pedestrian use, the restraint
of private cars, the centrality of public transport, streetlife. Zimbres wanted, in a
manner that seemed to draw on revived continental European traditions, a mixture
of uses on a dense mesh. Major elements helping to facilitate this included a street
market and a future university. In purely local terms, Aguas Claras might be seen as
a protected pocket of European-type urbanism in an otherwise largely undiffer-
entiated sprawl. But Zimbres had greater ambitions in the same way as modernist
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Fig. 26. Paolo Zimbres, perspective drawing of Aguas Claras, Aguas Claras masterplan 1991.
architecture was meant polemically as a claim on the future, an indicator of the

shape of the world to be, Aguas Claras had meaning for the Federal District as a
whole, envisaged as a continuation of the urbanism of the Pilot Plan within the
metropolitan region. Aguas Claras was meant, in other words, not as an isolated
development, but a consolidation and elaboration of what little existing urbanism
there was in the metropolis, with the implication that future development should
occur on the same lines.
It has an explicit class politics too, which is also a continuation of the Pilot Plan, at
least as realized this is an explicitly middle class city, whose public realm is built to
frame the public display of the Europhile bourgeois at leisure: the polite stroll with
family, the coffee at the street corner bar, the casual conversation with acquaintances
on the street, the hubbub of the urbane crowd. The renderings of the streetlife of
Aguas Claras show an unhurried, afuent, Europhile place, whose essential good
manners is represented in a rational plan. Zimbress key European visual reference
points Princes St. gardens in Edinburgh, the Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele in Milan
express this class politics clearly, as does the frequent citation of Curitiba, the one
Brazilian city to have successfully cultivated a neo-traditional urbanism at its centre
(see Lerner, 2005; Rogers, 1996, pp. 5961). The masterplan of Aguas Claras as is
the case with all neo-traditional urbanisms is profoundly dependent on the visual.
It makes an appeal to class identity, to lifestyle choice, through visual images. Its
images are unashamedly aspirational. In this, the masterplan for Aguas Claras
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marks a profound departure from the earlier imagination of Bras lias periphery as a
place of fear or anxiety, a place which through its very existence called into question
the security and the integrity of the original city. Aguas Claras instead is an
afrmation of the city, and extension of its values.
The realization of Aguas Claras is a somewhat different proposition to the
masterplan. The plans basic outline is maintained, and it keeps the parallel
boulevards and the metro and the parks; the mix of uses at ground level survives in a
vestigial and half-hearted way (Fig. 27). But the development is now driven by
property developers rather than planners, and at detail level the plan survives only
weakly. The metro, to save money, now runs above ground on a heavy and visually
intrusive viaduct the linear park once imagined over the line cannot exist. On the
boulevards, the majority of residential buildings have some other use at ground level
provision is still made for stores and cafes, so the bourgeois public realm survives
as folk memory. But few of them are used in the way they were intended if they are
used at all and in the more recent buildings, the vestigial cafes have been taken over
for entrances to secure underground car parking, protection from vehicle crime being
a more urgent consideration here than the re-enactment of bourgeois European
social rituals. Likewise, the network of public spaces survives at the level of plan, but
its detailed implementation denies its original purpose. The spaces exist they can be
found in the interstices between residential towers but more often than not, they
are located behind security gates, so they pay lipservice to the plan and its
description of open space, but they have been comprehensively privatized (Fig. 28).
The plan for Aguas Claras envisaged the enhancement of the urbanism of the Pilot
Plan; its realization in effect denies that possibility, despite any supercial
similarities; the Pilot Plan retains an enormous amount of public space, especially
on the south wing, through which it is possible to walk, for miles, unimpeded
through what is, in effect, a linear park. Aguas Claras has these spaces in theory, but
in practice, privatizes them: it therefore has the look of architectural modernism, but
does not put its social programme into practice.
Fig. 27. Aguas Claras, boulevard under construction, 2006. Parking garages replace storefronts.
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Fig. 28. Aguas Claras, entrance to residential compound, 2006. Public space privatized.
4.6. A case study: the Portal das Andorinhas
To see this critique a little more clearly, consider nally an example of a recent
development. It is chosen more or less at random from the hundred or so
developments under construction at the time of writing (2006) but it exemplies
well the corruption of the language and principles of architectural modernism, whilst
being, on the surface, a reiteration of them. The exterior language of these buildings
varies little. They are mainly point blocks of between 20 and 30 storeys, with
balconies, almost all with colourful tiling. The names of the developments
speak of fantasies of closeness to nature: Sonho Verde (Green Dream), Portal das
Andorinhas (Swallows Gate), Terras Brasil (Brazil Lands), Residencial Pau-Brasil
(Brazil-wood residence), or of foreign travel: Residencial Rhodes, Residencial
Riviera (Figs. 24 and 25).
The Portal das Andorinhas is one of the larger developments and lies on the south
side of the city, just off the southern boulevard. According to the crude perspectives
supplied by the developers, it consists of four point blocks of 1718 stories, set in a
gated compound, in which sport is well catered for. There is a football pitch, two
outdoor swimming pools, a tennis court, childrens playgrounds, a sauna, two gyms,
various indoor saloes de festas (recreation rooms), barbecue areas, and extensive
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gardens. The blocks have a somewhat garish decorative scheme predominantly

white, with thick bands of green, blue and red, a kind of bastard tartan. The
individual apartments are big, over 154 m2, with two receptions, four bedrooms, no
less than five bathrooms, a balcony, and quarters for domestic staff. The literature is
bullish: this is one of the ten wonders of Aguas Claras (Portal das Andorinhas,
2006).
Supercially this development deploys the language of architectural modernism.
The high-rise point block in open space can be traced back without difculty to Le
Corbusier (Le Corbusier, 1987, p. 167ff). However, the decoration in this case is
somewhat baroque. At roof level, the vertical bands continue beyond the roof line, in
the process turning a piece of two-dimensional patterning at once into a three-
dimensional part of the structure, a trompe loeil effect clearly forbidden by orthodox
modernism. But aside from that, the buildings, as far as we can tell, are surprisingly
functional. There is little here that would identify them as of the early 21st century
rather than of the early 1960s. And the background in this admittedly sketchy
rendering lls in the urban landscape with a series of schematic slabs and towers, all
very plain, all set in open parkland. The basic design language here, mediated
through the low form of the rendering, is little removed from Urbanisme. The
parallels with Costas Bras lia are also obviously clear.
That is, it might be said, the rst impression, and I am consciously dealing with
generalities here, with supercial impressions, with the perceptions of the non-
specialist. On the most basic level there is therefore continuity with the original
Bras lia and Zimbress plan at this most supercial level survives. It breaks down
however at the level of detail and the manner of its breaking down is revelatory of
the breakdown of modernist principles, so that in practice this is not, whatever its
outward appearance, an extension of the original Bras lia as its designer wished, but
rather an iteration of the gated communities or condominios fechados that now dene
the suburbs of Brazilian cities.
The detail, then: at ground level, the public spaces of the Zimbres plan exist, and
on the rendering are continuous with the space all around: at rst sight, the city in
the park of Le Corbusiers imagination. But look more closely and the
developments four towers are surrounded by a substantial masonry wall, two
metres at least in height. This is not then the city in the park but something else: a
camp, to invoke Agamben once more, an exceptional space isolated from the world
beyond (Agamben, 1998).
The metaphor might be protably continued: in the modernist imagination, the
park had multiple, possibly unlimited uses. It stood precisely in contradistinction
to the formalized, ritualized public spaces of the 19th century European city,
spaces that were consciously dened and limited as one of a battery of devices to
control social life. The modernist space could be dened precisely by its lack of
denition. Here at the Portal das Andorinhas, all public space is named, and its
purpose dened: here you play tennis, here football, there you drink a caipirinha or
take a sauna. All activity is prescribed and regulated; a mass of petty rules no doubt
will be, or already is, in operation to attempt to keep these activities within their
correct bounds, with security guards, doormen, and committees of residents to
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oversee their implementation. It is a place of numerous trivial kinds of authority, but

authority nonetheless.
Finally, there is the question of class. Architectural modernism in many of its
iterations carried with it the desire for social levelling, nowhere more clearly than at
Bras lia, where Costas plan envisaged the entire city, bar the president of the
republic, living in the same four-to-six-storey slab blocks. By mixing social classes in
the capitals housing, and by encouraging, by design, all residents whatever their
class origins to share the same facilities, Costa and Niemeyer imagined a new social
world. This ideal clearly has no place in the marketing of the Portal das Andorinhas,
whose landscaping, emphasis on security and leisure, not to mention price all suggest
if not absolutely conrm an appeal to class values.
But a class politics is seen more concretely in the physical layout of the individual
apartments. In Bras lias Pilot Plan, as Holston observed, individual apartments
were efcient rather than generous, optimized for light and space within a modest
oor area, a manifestation of the modernist value of economy (See Le Corbusier,
1989, pp. 122123). Part of this was the abolition of quarters for serving staff, which
in middle class dwellings could be substantial not only a bed and toilet, but a
separate circulation system in the house, and perhaps most importantly, an informal
transitional zone called a copa usually an adjunct to the kitchen in which the
residents of the dwelling and domestic staff could comfortably meet. At Bras lia,
such spaces were simply abolished, symbolic of the hoped for but unrealistic and
unrealized transformation to an egalitarian society (Holston, 1989, pp. 177178).
At Aguas Claras, however, the servants quarters at least in this development
reappear with renewed vigour. Here in the Portal das Andorinhas, there is a suite of
reasonable rooms for domestic servants, 15 m2 in all, 30 if the kitchen is included; not
only that, but this suite has its own entrance to the apartment, marking, in effect a
separate circulation system for domestic staff. The apartment therefore re-establishes
all of the traditional social hierarchies of the Brazilian middle-class dwelling all
supposedly abolished by Bras lia in 1960.
The realization of Aguas Claras is therefore distinctly anti-utopian. Where the
architectural vocabulary and the plan suggest the entrenchment of modernism, the
project utterly lacks the capitals utopian basis (Figs. 2830). The rhetoric of
Bras lias authors was both liberatory and levelling, and the architecture was meant
to bring about a social revolution. A surprising amount of this vision remains. You
can walk unimpeded for miles though the housing blocks in Bras lia. Private and
public spaces merge into one another; one is rarely challenged. There is nothing like
it anywhere else in Brazil, and it must be one of the best examples anywhere of the
modernist dream of housing in open parkland, accessible to all. Aguas Claras by
contrast is a profoundly privatized space. Its housing is pitched squarely at the upper
middle class, its blocks are closed at ground level, and its advertising rhetoric invokes
internal security rather than public life. It would be a mistake to assume that
this is an oppressive place it is not, yet but its reiteration of architectural
modernism, for all its supercial resemblance to the capital, has less in common
with Bras lia, than the gigantic gated community of Alphaville on the outskirts of
Sao Paulo. Alphaville, named without irony after the Godard lm, is a gated city,
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Fig. 29. Portal das Andorinhas, Aguas Claras, publicity material collected 2005.
with skyscrapers and suburbs, and its own police force. It is shameless about who it
wishes to include, and who it wishes to keep out. Aguas Claras does not need secure
fencing yet, but despite the modernism of its surfaces, it has more in common with
Alphaville than the capital down the road (Williams, 20052006).
4.6. Conclusion
Let me make three points in conclusion. Firstly, there is no question that after a
long period of effective disappearance, during which it was a discursively toxic
object, Bras lia has re-emerged. It has become a subject again in western urban
discourses, and (especially) in local discourses on this topic. Foreign accounts of the
city, now much more frequent than they were even as recently as the early 1990s,
stress the citys exotic character, through (for example) the now anachronistic quality
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Fig. 30. Floorplan of apartment at Portal das Andorinhas, Aguas Claras, publicity material collected 2005.
of the principal buildings, or the proliferation of millennial religious cults on the

citys periphery (Bellos, 1999). This literature is signicant insofar as it marks the
reappearance of the city, but it is ironic in tone, and, unlike earlier foreign
perceptions of the city, does not evidence any commitment to it. Bras lia does not
represent anything here other than a more or less amusing distraction. It no longer
represents a model of city development for foreigners, something that might be
emulated. For Mario Pedrosa, speaking at the Extraordinary International Congress
of Art Critics in 1959, Bras lia was worryingly alive (quoted in Paviani, 1985,
p. 105). In the more recent accounts of the city, Bras lia has more of the character of
a relic or ruin, something barely alive at all. At the same time, an important local
literature has developed, which has likewise superseded the toxic status the city once
had. In this revisionist literature, the writers evidence a much greater commitment
to the city, admit possible improvement. Their main task, however, has been to
discover the present shape of the city, in as open-minded a way as possible. In the
work of Holanda and el-Dahdah, the city has been examined in some new ways.
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Most importantly, their examinations have shown that what might have previously
been regarded as defects in the citys design such as the emptiness of the central
areas might be perceived as a positive advantage by some residents. They have also
shown that again in contrast to earlier accounts of the city Bras lia has pockets of
urbanity, concentrated, for example, around the TV tower, or in the better parts of
the south wing. With few exceptions, little of this material has appeared in languages
other than Portuguese.
The second point worth making, however, is that UNESCO status notwithstand-
ing, the city has become irrevocably metropolitan, with the vast majority of its
population living outside the boundary of the Pilot Plan. Certain peripheral
settlements have become very large, and as formal as anything in the centre; the
economic centre of the city is increasingly focused on Taguatinga. The periphery of
Bras lia has always been regarded as a problem, something which it would be better
to abolish; the UNESCO report was deeply informed by this sentiment. The best of
the recent literature on the city accepts its metropolitan nature as a fact. Zein goes as
far as to say that it is in the citys nature to be metropolitan, that it is all periphery in
effect, and that this is a cause for celebration, not denial.
The third and nal point is a prediction. Historians usually avoid making both
value judgements and predictions, but in this case it is worth speculating. Any
discussion of Bras lia after Bras lia, as it were, should at least acknowledge that the
city is growing fast, more rapidly than any other large city in Brazil. It is hard to see
it becoming a global city (to use Sassens term) in the way that Sao Paulo has
become, but it is well networked, and little dependent on old sectors of the economy
and technologies. It may yet become the megalopolis of the planalto. In that
scenario, the Pilot Plan becomes ever more isolated: culturally and politically
important, certainly, and of immense symbolic value, as well as an elegant place of
residence. But it is becoming the exact equivalent of the medieval quarters of
European cities, a historic urban fragment, maintained for largely sentimental and
symbolic reasons. The immense city round about represents Bras lias, and, most
likely, Brazils, future.
Acknowledgments
The research for this article was facilitated by the Arts and Humanities Research
Council (AHRC) who generously provided a Small Grant in the Creative and
Performing Arts in 20042005, and Research Leave in 2006. The University of
Edinburgh also provided research leave in 2006. During the writing of the paper,
my conversations with numerous people were vital in framing my argument. The
following need particular thanks: Stephen Cairns, Teixeira Coelho, Lucia Nagib,
Mark Crinson, Fred de Holanda, Fred Orton, Jane M. Jacobs, Ignaz Strebel, Ruth
Verde Zein, Paolo Zimbres and Sharon Zukin. Not least, I need to thank Michael
Hebbert, and the three anonymous readers of the rst draft of the paper for their
comments. Marcos and Rose Vieira Lucas provided incomparable hospitality on
numerous occasions in Brazil. All translations, unless otherwise indicated, are the
authors own.
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ARTICLE IN PRESS

1.2. Approaches and methods

The paper as a whole engages with debates in a range of academic and

Bras lia as text

2.1. Braslias disappearance

2.2. The anthropological turn

Locally referred to as Babylonia, 205206 North is a veritable palace of

2.3. Braslia lived

In retrospect, Holstons book has a historical character that may be seen as a

in 2002. Using the methodology of space syntax as a starting point, de Holanda

lifestyle involves the use of a number of morphologically different, and widely

2.4. Braslia exoticized

The Pilot Plan after 1960

3.1. UNESCO status

innovative and imaginative (UNESCO World Hertiage Centre, 2006). The

There are a number of commentaries on the UNESCO listing, often somewhat

3.2. The additions to the Pilot Plan

Fig. 7. Oscar Niemeyer, Memorial JK, Bras lia, 1980.

Fig. 9. Oscar Niemeyer, Procuradoria Geral da Republica, Bras lia, 19952002.

3.3. Braslia Shopping

I will reserve judgement on Niemeyers latest work, although it is worth saying

well as the remarkable Hotel Unique (1998), an improbable port-holed half-moon,

Fig. 16. Lucio Costa, Bus Station, Bras lia, 1960.

The so-called Babylonia shopping centre, much criticized by Holston, is a clear

Beyond the Pilot Plan

Imagine a city planned in every respect as a centre politically, economically,

Administrative Population Population Growth

Braslia 199,020 198,422 -0.3

Gama 121,630 130,580 7.4

Taguatinga 221,250 243,575 10.1

Brazlndia 47,720 52,698 10.4

Sobradinho 101,090 128,789 27.4

Planaltina 115,830 147,114 27.0

Parano 47,160 54,902 16.4

Ncleo Bandeirante 31,200 36,472 16.9

Ceilndia 342,830 344,039 0.4

Guar 102,910 115,385 12.1

Cruzeiro 55,730 63,883 14.6

Samambaia 157,400 164,319 4.4

Santa Maria 87,750 98,679 12.5

So Sebastio 44,180 64,322 45.6

Recanto das Emas 51,990 93,287 79.4

Lago Sul 28,410 28,137 -1.0

Riacho Fundo 21,370 41,404 93.7

Lago Norte 25,700 29,505 14.8

Candangolndia 13,830 15,634 13.0

TOTAL 1,817,000 2,051,146 12.9

centre. This paradox exemplies the contradictions in modernist urbanism, of which

4.2. The politics of the periphery

The periphery is a geographical location, but it is also, ineluctably, an expression

4.3. The myth of the Cidade Livre

Fig. 18. Cidade Livre, ca. 1957, postcard. Photographer unknown.

Fig. 19. Cidade Livre, ca. 1957. Photographer unknown.

Fig. 20. Cidade Livre, ca. 1957. Photographer unknown.

company NOVACAP as a temporary camp to service construction, with legal

we would go out to the Cidade Livre, attracted by its wild-west atmosphere.

4.4. The anti-myth

It was a policy that in effect continued the Haussmanian tendency of Brazilian

4.5. Aguas Claras: the sublimation of the periphery

Fig. 23. View of Aguas Claras from metro station, 2005.

Fig. 24. View of Aguas Claras from BR070 highway, 2006.

strong; it demands attention, regardless of its architectural quality. This is a

Fig. 25. Construction on south side of Aguas Claras, 2005.