The "Pilot" plan for Brasilia.
Posted on 03/13/2020 6:29:23 AM PDT by C19fan
There is a popular legend that 19th-century Italian priest Don Bosco, the founder of the Catholic Salesian Order and a revered saint, had a prophetic dream in 1883 that predicted a flourishing, futuristic city between parallels 15 and 20 in central Brazil. Many Brazilians believe the dream of Dom Bosco, as they call him, found fulfillment in the modern capital city of Brasilia, built between 1956 and 1960. Indeed, even before Brasilia was completed, a shrine, located directly on the 15th parallel, was sculpted and dedicated to Dom Bosco. Today’s Brasilia is filled with references to him, including the Santuario Dom Bosco, a concrete box filled with thousands of differently-shaded bluish stained glass. I wish someone had bothered to ask Dom Bosco if his dream was actually a nightmare.
In early 2020, I spent a couple of weeks in Brasilia, during which time I explored much of the city. Several things immediately stand out to the visitor. The first is that the city plan, designed by Lucio Costa, is shaped like an airplane with two principal components: the Monumental Axis (east to west) and the Residential Axis (north to south). The wings are where Brasilia’s bureaucrats were expected to live, the fuselage where they would work. As many residents explained to me, Costa’s was a time of great imagination regarding the potential of the airplane.
(Excerpt) Read more at theamericanconservative.com ...
Author doesn’t like cars. My guess is he’s not a fan of most American cities.
is shaped like an airplane with two principal components: the Monumental Axis (east to west) and the Residential Axis (north to south)
It’s a great urban plan…if people were 50’ tall.
He hated Brasilia, but his 70s outfit goes well with Brasilia's 60s modernism.
But, then, that's the story for every country south of our border, for Asia and for Africa.
I seem to remember reading at the time Brasilia was being built that “it is a slum, waiting for a city.”
There is an exception to your paradigm: If you could combine the states of Parana, Sta. Catarina, Rio Grande do Sul and Mato Grasso do Sul, you would have a nation as prosperous and as advanced as any in South America. And the state itself would be larger than Paraguay, Uruguay, or equal in size to both Paraguay and Uruguay combined.
I recall reading Brazilla had wonderful places to work, shop and play but they had no sidewalks to get to them...
The "Pilot" plan for Brasilia.
I knew a guy that loved Brazil, and married a Brazilian woman (who already had her green card).
He would mock Brasilia. That was in the mid-1980s. Maybe he saw the Robert Hughes show?
Tanzania tried the same concept by moving their Capital to Dodoma, in the center of the country. I spent a week there in 1980 while doing a Quelea (bird - “feathered locust”) helicopter survey for the UN Desert Locust Control organization. The two ornithologists & I stayed with a Yugoslav hydrologist who was “tearing his hair out” trying to find enough water for the new Capital.
That area received a bit over half a meter of rainfall, but open bodies of water experienced two meters of evaporation.
AFAIK, Dodoma never amounted to much and Dar es Salaam remaiins the seat of political and economic power.
No, Fei, his point was that the planners of Brazilia decided that residents would drive to bus and subway stops on an X grid while walking is too far from the stops and then ride the mass transports from those too far stops. Think about a transit system that has only 24 centralized stops with parking lots for a city planned to have 2 million residents. It is inadequate to service them if those residents cannot walk to their mass transit, depending on private automobiles to first get to the mass transit. It combines the worst of both systems, and the advantages of neither. That is what he was referring to in the article.
Useless exception, not even interesting.
I’m a fan of modernism and the Bauhaus and mid century design. My aesthetic is clean, simple and functional architecture.
Not to everyone’s taste but it wins me over when it works.
I’m thinking Russian Contructivism. Vkhutemas which I’m fond of. Good design can also be beautiful as well:
I like modernist art, too. Always timeless. Nothing faddish or kitschy about it.
Modernist is usually soulless. Give me Second Empire any day of the week. Sadly torn down in countless towns and cities in the mid-20th century for that aforementioned modernist soullessness.
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