New Delhi | Exhibition: the making of Brazil’s dream city Brasília, built around a ‘central vista’
The Hindu
The capital of Brazil, conceptualised as a flagbearer of democracy, is the subject of an ongoing exhibition at New Delhi’s NGMA
To begin with, there was no vegetation, no people and no lake.... just a cross on the ground. Two roads met there in perpendicular, marking the start of construction of Brazil’s new capital, Brasilia, a vast expanse of 5,802 sq. km. to be built-up on a plateau at an elevation of 1,100 metres in Brazil’s Planalto Central highlands.
The dream of a new capital for Brazil, where all development and people had thus far crowded into coastal cities like Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, was more than a century old. It was even written into the Brazilian Constitution in 1891, but only commissioned in 1956, when President Juscelino Kubitschek saw it as the base for his slogan ‘50 years of development in 5’.
By now, the dream of Brasilia was about much more than a new city — it was to be the flag-bearer of Brazilian democracy, of a modern, progressive outlook for the country, and an egalitarian society that would allow the people living more inland, some much-needed development — all of which would go into the capital’s design.
The city was designed, much like Washington D.C.’s Mall, and Lutyen’s New Delhi, around a ‘central vista’. The vista included the Presidential Palace, Parliament building and offices at one end, government buildings down the way and then planned housing shaped in ‘super quadras’, all leading down to the Brasilia bus stop at the other end.
The ‘Plano Piloto’ or city plan — likened to a bird, a bow and arrow, or an airplane — was made by architect Lúcio Costa, along with buildings designed by the world-famous architect Oscar Niemeyer, who chose concrete as his medium for its ‘flow’, and structural engineer Joaquim Cardozo, who brought form to the concrete. The entire plan, including an artificial lake built by damming two nearby rivers, was completed in an astounding 41 months, and inaugurated in 1960.
More than 60 years later, the making of Brasilia is the subject of an exhibition at New Delhi’s National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), curated by Brazilian Ambassador André Aranha Corrêa do Lago, himself an architecture enthusiast, who knew Niemeyer before his death in 2012. The exhibition which includes photographs, tapestries, tiles and even modernistic furniture from Brazil, begins with a full model of Brasilia’s main avenue: a central vista within Delhi’s Central Vista, as it were.
Every Brasilia building has a unique style, says the Ambassador. The presidential offices, and the Itamaraty Palace (Foreign Ministry) are built low and wide, the Parliament buildings tower as two conjoined skyscrapers over the city, but all have one important similarity: Niemeyer’s designed pillars. Unlike the grand colonial columns favoured in other capitals, Niemeyer drew his pillars as ‘feminine’ L-shaped wings, tapering at the top and bottom to give the buildings the sense that they barely touch the ground while they reach for the sky at the other end.