Editors: Ana Tostões, Ivan Blasi
Guest editors: Sylvia Ficher, Andrey Rosenthal Schlee
Keywords: Modern Movement, Modern architecture, Brasilia modern architecture, World Heritage, Modern urban design.
Since Brasilia’s World Heritage inscription in 1987, the city has developed public awareness regarding the value of a major accomplishment in the history of urbanism. The singularity of Brasilia lies in its ability of being simultaneously rooted in the past while looking ahead to the future, envisioning an approach that should affirm Brazil’s industrialization effort and the need to provide access to life quality incorporating a specific genuine cultural tradition; an approach where the new capital should be the image of the homeland. Lúcio Costa, the architect who sensed and perceived the need to rescue architectural heritage, formulated unprecedented theoretical principles, articulating both realities. He was aware of the fact that modern architecture was a powerful means to foster a national identity because, according to modern principles argued in Brazil, a bond should exist between an erudite avant-garde and traditional popular features. Costa revealed the structural resemblance between raw architecture from the 18th Century—the plain Portuguese style—and the new constructions, discovering the same logic, rationality, rigor and strictness.
Published:
2010-11-01
Editorial
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Since Brasilia’s World Heritage inscription in 1987, the city has developed public awareness regarding the value of a major accomplishment in the history of urbanism. The singularity of Brasilia lies in its ability of being simultaneously rooted in the past while looking ahead to the future, envisioning an approach that should affirm Brazil’s industrialization effort and the need to provide access to life quality incorporating a specific genuine cultural tradition; an approach where the new capital should be the image of the homeland. Lúcio Costa, the architect who sensed and perceived...
Essays
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Also in the field of preservation, Brazil has made an unparalleled contribution to the MoMo. After all, when in 1988 docomomo was founded, the country already had a number of modernist works legally protected. And Brasilia had joined the select World Heritage of UNESCO, the first modernist urban complex to be conferred that honor. The precedent was established, and since then other MoMo works - all prior to Brasilia - received the distinction: the Bauhaus in 1996, the Schröder House and the University of Caracas in 2000, the Tugendhat House in 2001, the White City of Tel Aviv in 2003.
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The Competition for Brasilia’s Pilot Plan, 1957, brought together 26 projects for the Federal Capital. These projects, expressing the planning culture of the first half of the twentieth century, contribute to a diverse knowledge of planning solutions. But what element unites these projects? The common factor to them is the urban structure based on two urban axes. The reason for this is the flat territory and the introduction of such infrastructure. A model of planning cities based on their minimum elements that not only organize, but also qualify the place.
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Dislocating the capital to Brazil’s interior highlands is a long standing project in the country’s history. The project was first linked to the transfer of the royal court from Lisbon to the Portuguese America, where a metropolis would be established in what until then had been a colonial purveyor of goods. Until 1953, the quest for a worthy capital involved many factors such as the establishment of a Portuguese empire in the Americas, Portugal’s repudiation of an Ancien Régime monarchy in the South Atlantic, the formation of a counter hegemony in a former colony, or the construction of...
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The urban design for Brasilia emphasizes the role of the city as a capital, that is to say, as an expression of State identity and power. Lúcio Costa considered monumentality as a characteristic inherent in urbanism, but this should not be achieved by any ostentatious grandiosity in terms of the volumes and sizes designed, and rather by providing a more singular external expression in the building concept used incorporating nature, capable of both pleasing and moving their occupants. The dimension of monumentality is a fundamental question in understanding the urban solution adopted in...
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By the 1950s, a shared culture spreading internationally through teaching and specialized literature became common currency in professional circles and gave rise to a repertoire of urban theories and practices. An examination of Lúcio Costa’s winning entry for the pilot plan of Brasilia attest to the existence of these paradigmatic formulae. Further more, not only was Brasilia a product of this culture, it grew to become itself archetypal. Yet, this high tide would be short-lived. In late 50s and early 60s, this veritable urban designer’s toolbox began to lose its legitimacy to become...
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This is a selection of some writings by authors that visited, commented and analyzed Brasilia, collected mainly in non-Brazilian literature. Testimonies and judgments, most of them expressing mistrust, disbelief, disapproval and prejudice about the embryonic capital, and the change of the nature of the critique, looking to a complex city with half a century of existence. Quotations are presented in chronological order and in a dialectic array, contrasting points of views at distinctive moments of the city.
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Lúcio Costa proposes an urbs and a civitas in his winning entry for the Brasilia competition (1957). The new seat of citizenship was to celebrate the March to the West dreamt by Brazilian Independence’s Patriarch José Bonifácio (1823) - who named the new capital - and taken up by president Juscelino Kubitschek (1955) - who promised fifty years of progress in five. Brasilia was to be a machine for remembering past, present and future hopes. Therefore, it had to be a memorable object itself, composed of memorable elements; differentiation from context counted in all levels. Like Costa,...
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The Pilot Plan of the new Brazilian Federal Capital, by Lúcio Costa, was selected in a public competition held in 1957. The city was inaugurated barely three years later by President Juscelino Kubitschek, in April 1960, when the official creation of the University of Brasilia became a reality. Preparing to celebrate fifty years of existence, the University campus probably represents the most accomplished set of Brutalist architecture in the country and an excellent sample of the inventive resources of Brazilian architects. A functionalist city inside another. They are distinct from each...
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Surprisingly, Brasilia has a major assortment of foreign architecture, due to the diplomatic complexes it houses in the so-called South and North Embassy Sectors. From an urban point of view, such sectors were envisioned as a great international fair of buildings by renowned professionals. These buildings display a variety of solutions, in which it is always possible to distinguish typical features of the country of origin. In many of them the intention to reflect the modernity of Brasilia prevails; in others, the main objective was to enhance the country’s traditional architecture; and...
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This essay aims to show Athos Bulcão’s artworks integrated into architecture in Brasilia, his career and partnership and the significance of his work as a precious legacy for the city. The artwork of Athos Bulcão not only reveals beauty and colors but an architectural identity that reflects a successful partnership between modern architecture and fine arts in Brazil. Brasilia is the high mark of modern movement where Athos Bulcão became a unique artist with the skill to amalgamate his art into architecture.
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This article describes the highly successful restoration of Alvorada Palace completed in 2005 by Sergio Valle Brasileiro. After situating the importance of the Alvorada within Niemeyer’s overall oeuvre and describing the original design, the dilapidated state of the building at the turn of the 21st century is described. The details of the restoration, including meetings with Oscar Niemeyer about specific design decisions and consultation with IPHAN, and the challenge of sourcing new materials to match the original, such as jacaranda - now protected by IBAMA - are also studied. The...
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The Palace of Congress in Brasilia, designed by Oscar Niemeyer in 1958, played an effective role in defining its urban context. Lúcio Costa`s original competition sketches show one tower, with a domed horizontal building. Niemeyer conciliated the different levels of the frontal Esplanade and of the lower Plaza behind, rotating it, and placing two domes and two towers instead of one, representing the two legislative institutions housed. The building presence amidst a vast green area became the main symbol of Brasilia. In the last 50 years, however, its surroundings gave place to several...
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This article explores the headquarters of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Brazil, the Itamaraty Palace which is one of the most important buildings designed by Oscar Niemeyer in Brasilia. Besides the constructive complexity, in this project the architect organizes and ranks several spatial correlations, making the palace terrace - the varanda - its great architectural surprise.
Tributes
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Designer, architect, educator, researcher, critic, polemicist, Arie’s multifaceted and ceaseless activity was, sadly, cut short just a week after his participation and lectures at the docomomo Congress and Icomos in Mexico, last August. His formative years at the Architecture faculties in Montevideo, Uruguay, and the Technion in Haifa during the late sixties, were decisive for his long lasting belief in the Modern Movement instrumental role in the creation of “A new society” and, in his words, “A creative relation between people, their environment and their time”.
Conservation Issues
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With the aim of contributing to the documentation and conservation of the modern architectural heritage, this paper presents Monteiro & Giro Complex (M&G), built during the 50’s in Quelimane, Mozambique, with the goal of stressing the modernity of the social program and the technological approach. If one wants to gain a better understanding of the worldwide Diaspora of architectural modernism, it is essential to document and analyse the important heritage of sub–Saharan Africa. Modern architectural debates have been reproduced, transformed, contested and sometimes even improved in...
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The sky is low above Motovilikha. Making our way along a muddy street, in the timid light of this part of the Urals we see emerging before us a silhouette of carbonated concrete, an iron structure rusting in the cold, whose plaster panels between pilasters suggest a construction site of dubious standards. It is difficult to believe that eighty years before this old workers’ club designed by constructivist architect P. Golosov (Gladyshev, 2008) provided the early Soviet society with up to three hundred thousand meals a day (Semyannikov, 2002). An emblem of the new socialist urbanisation,...
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As the British colony of British Honduras prepared for independence, it adopted two important symbols of its emerging identity; the name of Belize was chosen for the new country and a new capital was planned from which this emerging nation would be governed. That new capital was called Belmopan and was to be established inland from the old coastal capital of Belize City. Designed by the British planning and architectural firm of Norman and Dawbarn, this new city followed in the tradition of British Garden City planning, making discrete references to the Mayan heritage of the region,...
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Modern heritage is not protected in Chile. Most of Chilean modern architectural heritage stands without an official decree protecting it from being modified or even demolished. This is a consequence of having state-controlled organisms in charge of the protection and defense of architectural heritage that use almost exclusively the building’s age as main criteria for its appraisement. From this point of view it seems difficult that constructions that are only between 40 and 90 years old may catch the attention of heritage preservation government officials. However negative the situation...
News
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The 11th docomomo International Conference took place in Mexico City from the 19th to the 27th August 2010, under the title “Living in the Urban Modernity”, allowing participants to analyze the issues that transformed the city and its architecture during the first part of the 20th Century. Urban area growth brought up an environment that favored the presence of Modern Architecture, in which new materials and developing techniques took new forms. Likewise, and in relation to working and leisure spaces, social changes had a visible transformation influence over education, health, hygiene...
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Ana Tostões, Chair of docomomo International, welcomed all representatives and audi- tors to the 11th docomomo International Council Meeting. She asked Hubert–Jan Henket, honorary president, to say some words in remembrance of Dennis Sharp. Next to an image of the “architect, scholar, critic, writer, teacher, bookseller, cook and walking encyclopedia” dancing in the tango competition at the 4th International docomomo confer- ence in Sliac, Slovakia, he finished his tribute with Dennis’ words: “While I breathe, I hope.”
