available because they were associated with the now fallen Napoleonic Empire, were invited to Rio. The architect Auguste-Henri-Victor Grandjean de Montigny had the most impact, in spite of the fact that most of his projects were never carried out; he did build and found the first school of architects in the Americas.45
Under its two emperors, Rio grew, educated itself, grappled with its tropical diseases and gradually evolved towards a wage society; slave trading was abolished in 1850 and slavery itself in 1888, but neither emperor had much interest in projecting imperial power. The republic (from 1889), on the other hand, became increasingly aware of regional competition from Buenos Aires, for immigrants as well as for international capital and prestige.
In the first decade of the twentieth century Rio joined the late-nineteenth-century Haussmann admirers from Mexico to Buenos Aires in a major overhaul of the central city and sanitary system. In Rio the key figure was the prefect Francisco Pereira Passos. Rio’s equivalent to the Avenida de Mayo was the Avenida Central, a thoroughfare running Southeast from the centre and opened in 1906 after a series of brutal demolitions and evictions. In 1912 its name was changed to the current Avenida Rio Branco, in memory of a major political figure of the dying Brazilian aristocracy.
Like its Hispanic American sisters, Rio substituted a variety of individual – but all historical – architectural styles for the strict uniformity of the Parisian boulevards. It issued in a new cultural district with a fine arts school, national library, the Municipal Theatre (paying homage to the Parisian Palais Garnier) and Cinelândia, a cinema quarter (in 1908!). Politics was somewhat secondary, but not absent. What started being built as the Archbishop’s Palace became the Supreme Court upon completion; the Monroe Palace was placed here; the square in front of the Municipal Theatre was dedicated to and monumentalized by the second president, Floriano ‘Iron Marshal’ Peixoto, and to the right of the theatre, the Municipal Council was soon erected.46
The presidential capital-city programme which Pereira Passos was appointed to implement focused on immigration and capital, not on tourism.47 But in 1912 Sugarloaf Mountain became accessible by cable car, and in 1917 construction started on the Copacabana Palace Hotel, emulating the Negresco Hotel in Nice.
At midnight on 21 April 1960, a bell rang in Brasília, the same bell which in 1792 had rung the execution of Tiradentes, the first fighter for the independence of Brazil. Now it announced the ceremonial inauguration of the new capital of the nation. The city was illuminated, a message from Pope John XXIII was read and a religious communion and benediction of the city were given.48
This was not secularized Europe, but the elaborate thirty-six-hour ritual should not let us forget that what was inaugurated was an avant-garde of capitals. The city itself was planned by Lúcio Costa as a ‘sign of the cross’,49 and the initiation of construction in 1957 was celebrated by a Mass on the same day as the Mass Pedro Álvares Cabral organized in 1500 to celebrate his discovery of Brazil.*
The contrast between the tropical languor of Rio and the dashing daring of Brasília is stunning. How did the same country manage to move from one to the other in little more than half a century?
The twentieth century unleashed a new economic dynamic of Brazil, away from the land-rent economy of slave-worked plantations and mines to entrepreneurial coffee cultivation and processing, using wage-labour and investing in manufacturing. This dynamic became increasingly concentrated in São Paulo. Its Avenida Paulista, opened in 1891, became the main street of the country, and its Week of Modern Art in 1922 was the launching-pad of artistic modernism in Brazil.
Brazil never lived by the frontier myth of the United States, but it was, like the US, a country of continental proportions with the mystique of unexplored wilderness. Parts of the Brazilian elite developed a notion of cultivating and civilizing the largely uninhabited interior of the country. Already in 1891 the Republican Constitution stipulated an ultimate goal of moving the capital to the interior.
Here we have a new societal dynamic and a vague geo-cultural goal. But this is not enough. The politics have to be specified, and the cult of the interior has to get a vanguardist architectural push.
The entrepreneurial Paulistas had no interest in a new capital, but they were not running the country’s politics, having been violently defeated in 1936. The political dynamic of Brazil derived from the presidencies of Getúlio Vargas (1930 to 1945 and 1951 to 1954): statist, anti-oligarchic and developmentalist. Although he was not a chosen successor, the ‘populism’ of Vargas was the political formation and base for Juscelino Kubitschek, the president who built Brasília. It was probably not without significance that JK, as he became known, had been mayor of Belo Horizonte, itself a daring political construction of the nineteenth century as the new capital of the rich state of Minas Gerais and where JK in the early 1940s pushed radical urban modernization. Brasília was a monument to presidential developmentalism.50
A crucial part of Brasília was Brazilian architecture. It developed early, because, as noted above, imperial Brazil initiated architectural formation in the Americas. In the 1920s Brazilian architecture started to embrace modernism. Lúcio Costa, an extra-curricular disciple of Le Corbusier, became head of the Belas Artes School in 1930. Through public commissions, modernism soon became a national style of Brazilian architecture. A world-pioneering modernist building was the Ministry of Education and Health in Rio in 1936, designed by Costa and a team including Oscar Niemeyer and the landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx, also active in Brasília later. As mayor of Belo Horizonte, Kubitschek put forward Niemeyer to create a luxury tourist area in Pampulha, the most remarkable part of which is its stunningly original modernist church. US curators acknowledged the extraordinary achievements of Brazilian modernism in the exhibition Brazil Builds at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1943.51
The crucial contextual factors mentioned above coalesced, quite contingently, in Kubitschek’s 1955 presidential campaign. He was running, on the basis of the heteroclite Vargas coalition, for thirty objectives of fifty years of development in five years. Building a new capital was not among his thirty goals. Only in the course of the campaign trail did it emerge as a ‘synthesis goal’.52
Kubitschek won the election, then turned naturally to his old collaborator from fifteen years back, Oscar Niemayer, who had left the directive plan (Plan Piloto) to an international competition (won with an artistic sketch by Lúcio Costa), but kept the role of main architect. Kubitschek made Brasília his life’s project, but left almost all design matters to Niemeyer and Costa while recruiting an able entrepreneur, Israel Pinheiro, to run the state construction company. The uniquely trusting relationship between the powerful Brazilian president in the midst of a large-scale national developmentalist decade (with 80 per cent growth from 1956–61) and the world’s most creative architect at that time – who was basically given a blank cheque for deploying his extraordinary creativity – created Brasília, the city of twentieth-century modernism.
What is the power message of Brasília? First of all, that Brazil is a nation committed to radical change and development – but without indicating what kind of change and development, apart from a belief in automobiles and their possession of cities.* Costa’s plan sketch was basically aesthetic, and honoured as such. Niemeyer was a card-carrying Communist and his commitment to democracy is manifested in the balance of the three powers, executive, legislative and judiciary (clearly dominated by the legislative), in Praça dos Três Poderes (‘Three Powers Plaza’), but his buildings principally display a plastic creativity, with few, if any, political indicators.
The residential area plan did include an egalitarian vision of uniform ‘super-blocks’, oriented inwards to a social life away from the streets, which were left to cars according to Le Corbusier modernism. Contrary to the explicit stratification of New Delhi or Islamabad, the residential ‘super-blocks’ of Brasília were originally intended to house government employees of all kinds, although Costa hinted
