Transcript for:
Lecture on Brasilia

Bing bong Bing bong Bing bong Bing bong Bing bong Brasilia is just the most fascinating place [Music] it's a city that is one of the most ambitious single building projects ever there is nowhere that I can think of that has quite the same sense of space it has colossal skies I've never been anywhere quite like that it's a place that you can fly over and it looks like nowhere else so a city that that's placed right in the center of the country and it is imagined as being some way that will open up that the whole country for development [Music] Brittany has got a really long history it's a creation of a very short period in some ways but the idea of opening up the interior of Brazil by establishing an inland capital had been around for about well the best part of a century so the people were talking about it in there towards the end of the Portuguese colonial period and then in the the 1891 Constitution there is provision for a new capital somewhere in the middle of Brazil it doesn't say any more than that but that's the beginning of the process the the modern founding of Brasilia starts very precisely in 1955 [Music] but then governor offered the state of Minas Gerais just a lien of kubacheck was campaigning to be president and on the stump in 1955 someone asked him what was going to happen with this plan in the Constitution to build a new Capitol and he said very simply we will implement the Constitution and so for better or worse he won the election became president and in 1956 he was faced with the decision of whether to go ahead with this this promise and well he did and he knew that he was going to have to finish it somehow in four years because that was the length of the presidential term so to create an entirely new capital from scratch in the middle of nowhere was an extraordinarily ambitious thing to try and do [Music] a competition was held in 1956 and 26 people entered 26 architectural firms entered from all over the world it was though that there was an international jury and in the end the winner was a firm or in fact an individual Lucio Costa both Brazilian planner and architect who hadn't entered but was friends with kubacheck and with the main architect involved in the central part of Brasilia Oscar Niemeyer nehemiah had already been selected to create the monumental buildings in the center of the city Costa produced an extraordinary non-competition entry it's very simple it's just on a on a handful of file cards and it has some very crude sketches and it begins and it says you know dear committee I'm not really entering this competition but I've just had this idea and it's kind of sprung to me I thought you ought to know about it it's a very simple graphic plan for a city and in the end through I kind of stitch up through you know friends talking to each other he won he was given the job of producing in the city and was a building process that lasted between our four years and he was inaugurated on 21st of April 1960 lucia kostas designed for the city his his competition entry that's not a competition entry it's a very poetic text that's primarily about what kind of symbols what kind of forms do you need to make a city have the true characteristics of a capital city and a capital city that implicitly will last for forever he wants something of that for Brasilia right from the beginning so the kinds of reference points he puts in there often historical reference point to make a true capital city you need different scales you need a magnificent part you need a ceremonial part you need a part that maybe is very informal and has little lanes or alleyways the plan is starting lead clear from the air it resonates with primal imagery it's an airplane it's a bird it's a sign of the Cross depending on whose account you read for me it refers to the pioneering nature of that part of the city rather than the fact that it might look like a plane so it's pilot as in an experiment of prototype Brazil obviously had been in existence as an independent nation for seventy years but it was very conscious of it being still a new nation I mean it politically it's constantly reinventing itself so that there's always a sense of newness that the rhetoric of brasilia's architects was based in Liberatore and levelling and the architecture was designed to bring about a social revolution but the plan has also been described as conservative even authoritarian the crux of it is a great symmetrical Boulevard on an essentially neoclassical plan some people think it's there too represent an uphold authority the plan is basically across the long axis is the ice Shaw hollaby area or the the highway axis that's about 14 kilometers long it's bisected right in the middle by a five kilometer I shall monument dull or the monumental axis that's the axis that contains all of the government buildings right in the middle where the two axes cross is in a way not what you would think you might think it would be you know government buildings or something really monumental it's not it's the bus station and if this is one of the most extraordinary bus stations on earth it's a multistory complex all human life is there and it has a huge motorway going over the top it's a very very complex structure it's the only part of the pilot plan with the density and richness of more traditional Brazilian cities and it's a building largely used by the poorer classes the people who are most likely to take the bus even though it was intended to be a building all about movement and speed modern Brazil along the monumental axis there are clusters of government buildings they're almost like become as Platonic ideal forms very pure very white very sculptural they don't really look like buildings from perhaps that the most important is the square of the three powers of the precipice to its Pateros and that has the Congress the presidential palace is there and it has the judiciary and this great big enormous Plaza then a bit further down the monumental axis you've got Cathedral which is put one of the most iconic buildings in the city it looks like a crown of thorns where the thorns are the ribs of the Cathedral when people visit Brasilia they tend to visit the monuments of the centre they tend not to go to the residential areas that's a pity in a way because some of those areas are beautifully done the residential parts are really a key part of the plan they're normally known as super quadrants or super blocks maximum of six storeys so quite low arranged in formal clusters the architecture is not that interesting of the bottom of itself but as a group these blocks create a really quite seductive environment with lots of planting sometimes facilities like little cafes the planning didn't abolish class distinctions by any means but apartments in the pilot plan are suggestive of a more egalitarian way of living even if such a transformation never really happened if you want to see really good modernist planning the super blocks are one of the places that you can see it Brasilia today is a vast sprawling metropolis only a small proportion of people live in the plan of balata the pilot plan the center economically it's one of the most successful parts of Brazil the per capita income is very high for a middle-class resident of the city it appears to work very well it's got a sense of order and safety relative tranquility that the big Brazilian cities on the coast don't generally have it's still a place that's very divided between the center and the periphery there are many parts of the periphery which are very poor where there are colossal divisions of wealth where personal safety is not assured at all but in general compared to other Brazilian cities if it's regarded as a success the center of the city the the pilot plan is often described as a as a utopia it's and it's now preserved it's now listed by UNESCO so it's not possible to make any major changes to that Niemeyer was a very very distinctive architect he got involved before the competition happened because he knew kubacheck the president and the president already commissioned him to design some buildings for the new city he's somebody who had worked with local BCA early in the 20th century he'd taken on board lots of the trends that were happening in Europe but he'd added to that a sense of sculpture or exuberance this is a version of modernism that is partly recognizable in European terms but partly it does something completely new what near Myers particularly famous for is doing very bold things with concrete concrete as his material because of its plastic qualities and also the fact that concrete's a material that needs a lot of labour but labor and Brazil's rate sheep or at least it was then lots to do Pilates or columns that maybe no taper to a very very narrow point he likes to do columns that appear to be upside down he likes to do things that give you a sense of maybe rubes that are floating on doing something impossible he's become very influential architects like zaha hadid maybe Daniel Libeskind who've built some of the most spectacular buildings of the last 20 or 30 years used near Meyer as a reference point I think Nehemiah was very concerned with experience the kinds of forms that he was producing and the kinds of things that he was saying were not unlike the things that were said around surrealism and he certainly knew about surrealism he was in touch with many of the people in that movement in France at the time of it being produced some of his forms are like the things you would see in in the painting of to run me talk no great Catalan artist Nehemiah was very keen that we think of him as an artist so if you were to visit his studio and he was still alive you would be taken to a desk and you would you would meet him and he would be somebody who would just sketch a few lines and then he would say that oh I'm going to give this to my my assistants now and they'll turn it into a building so there was a sense that a fundamental level he regarded what he was doing as as art and then the practical dimensions to the buildings somebody else could look after that I mean I think it was a bit of an act he was a very skilled technician and thing he knew about engineering but he wanted us to believe that he was an artist and certainly you know where everything that we know about the building suggests somebody whose interests were very much in in form rather than the function of the buildings there was a number of near Mies buildings which are criticised in those terms the Ministry buildings housing the civil service were built with so much glazing in a city that has some of the highest levels of sunshine in the world they were basically uninhabitable at certain times of the day with the Cathedral he designed it as mostly a glazed structure you enter the cathedral by going down into the ground some people said that this was a joke that you ended up going into this hot glazed structure by going underneath the street level so you were descending into hell I don't know whether that's right or not but it's an amazing piece of sculpture Newmar was an eighth he wasn't a believer at all he was a very active member of the Brazilian Communist Party so who knows if this uncomfortable effect was intentional in all of his work he is thinking of the viewer having an experience that takes them out of the everyday world that kind of shocks them he often used that word he wanted to shock and surprise visitors he wanted to take them out of the ordinary world to take them somewhere else - thinking aright I've never seen something like that before the character of Brasilia that people often remark on is the way that it looks like it's come from another planet that was exactly what Nehemiah was after [Music] you