BRASÍLIA by REM

KOOLHAAS
Dutch architect writes about the
Brazilian modern city
TEXT REM KOOLHAAS

TRANSLATION BRAM VAN DER HOUT

REVISION & EDITION GABRIEL KOGAN & RODRIGO VILLELA

[Editor’s Note: This was written by Rem Koolhaas on the occasion of his first trip to
Brasília in August of 2011, and has since remained unpublished. Revista Centro (online
Brazilian magazine about architecture, urban studies, art & social science) brings it now
in two versions (English and Portuguese) translated directly from its original language,
Dutch. In addition to offering his first impressions about the modern Brazilian capital,
Rem also emphasizes an autobiographical narrative about the origins of his relation with
architecture]

Brasília
In 1956 – I don’t remember the exact circumstances – I happened to come upon an
article in TIME Magazine about the new Brasília. The article unveiled the plans for a
city-to-be, right in the centre of the country; a dream of a city that would soon
become a reality. It was there and then that my 11-year-old self made a decision: I was
to become an architect. And not just any architect – a Brazilian architect.

What followed were years of sketching and planning – emigration plans in particular; a
rather ambitious project for a grammar-school student. Practicality caught up with
me, and for eight years I managed to ignore the Brazilian pull. I became a journalist,
and a co-writer of movie scripts. Until the day I realised – and this was nothing less
than a revelation to me – that an architect is the one who decides the scripts of daily
life. My initial calling rang more clearly in my ears than ever before.

A lot had happened between 1956 – the year TIME published its article – and 1968. By
this time I was studying architecture in London. My conviction that architecture is a
creative power, one that has led humanity for over three thousand years, was
undermined by doubt and flower power. I became an architect at a moment in time
when the foundations of architecture itself seemed about to crumble.
1968

‘Generation 1968’ was the generation that would set mankind free – free from
architecture, amongst other things. The city as a modernist ‘ideal’ was no longer
conceivable, nor relevant. ‘Order’ was a dirty word, and had been replaced by ‘self-
organisation’. Utopias had turned into grim fairytales, used to ward off the incurable
idealism of architecture.

I personally did not join in this collective abdication. On the contrary: I studied the
Berlin Wall, the construction of which was finished in the same year as Brasília, to
prove the continuing power of architecture – the power to cut cities and lives in two.
This was an argument that didn’t seem to convince anyone at the time…
Now, almost half a century later, I am in Brasília, the first city that made me want to
build cities myself. Between 1972 and today, I have passionately researched and
written about world cities: New York, Atlanta, Lagos, Singapore, China’s Pearl River
Delta, even Dubai. Not as ideal cities, but as cities that exhibit uncontrollable qualities.
I have looked at those cities through the eyes of an anthropologist, rather than from a
moralist’s perspective. As an architect, I should have rejected them altogether.

Today, however, the city itself is not my main preoccupation anymore. We all know
that the world is urbanising at break-neck speed. The classical city no longer exists; in
its stead, cities with 30 million inhabitants will become the norm during this century.
People are leaving the countryside in ever-growing numbers; I look at what those last
inhabitants have left behind. The countryside, the unknown frontier of change…
Brasília, then, would be the last city.
2011

Brasília’s design has the shape of an airplane with its wings pointing forward. The
plane’s fuselage consists of two rows of five identical ten-story buildings: one for each
Ministry. The rows are separated by a wide strip of green: the corridor.

The parliament is located in its tail: two raised disks and a platform upon which a
dome – the Senate – and a flying saucer – the House of Representatives – have
landed.

At the moment of my visit, the wide strip of green has been turned into a sea of red
flags and banners, held by peasants who are singing and shouting in protest against a
corrupt and arbitrary ruling class.

Inside the parliament building, another group of farmers, just as numerous as the ones
outside but clad in green, are being ushered in under the glorious banner of
microcredit.

The wings of the city layout consist of over 130 so-called “superblocks”
(superquadras): rectangular plots of land with an average of nine orthogonally-placed
apartment blocks each, all different yet monotonous– a city of 1,500 apartment blocks
in total.

Sartre has been here to take a look, as well as Queen Elizabeth, Fidel Castro, Che
Guevara, and Willem Sandberg. André Malraux saw the city as a sign of hope; the
Pope gave his blessing, as did most modern architects: Gropius, Le Corbusier, Prouvé,
Mies van der Rohe, Nervi.

Juscelino Kubitschek, Brazil’s president between 1956 and 1960, conceived Brasília as
a military campaign. The ‘airplane’ was designed by Lucio Costa in 15 days, using
paper and ink. The fuselage was exclusively furbished – in only four years – with
buildings by Oscar Niemeyer. Niemeyer, afraid of flying himself, travelled between
the old capital, Rio de Janeiro, and the new administrative centre in a Land Rover.
Brasília contains an exceptional number of buildings, produced by one architect, at an
insane speed.

His haste and urgency are still palpable. No nonsense, nothing superfluous, no
unnecessary details. Niemeyer had no choice and this may be why he is considered a
genius to this very day.
Oneliner

The word ‘oneliner’ often has negative connotations. In architecture, however, a

sketch consisting of one flowing line is considered proof of genius. Those oneliners
remain Niemeyer’s strength – or are they his handicap?

In Brasília, there are two buildings that fascinate because they’re each other’s
opposites. The one is a merciless, slightly bent, 700 meter-long line. This is the
university (UNB). All aspects of learning and research are brilliantly summed up in this
seemingly endless, prefabricated concrete serpent.

Its absolute opposite is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. A neutral, nondescript block on
the outside, its inside turns out to be a boîte à miracles, hollowed out as a labyrinth. A
palace of diplomacy, consisting entirely of sensations – from challengingly abstract to
overpoweringly decorative. A mise-en-scène for the pure sake of effect.

Niemeyer had his ghostwriters for these kinds of stunts: the concepts and sequences
of the interior were orchestrated by ambassador Vladimir Murtinho, a born diplomat.
Some of the rooms are too beautiful for their often shady visitors; and this is all
intentional.

Compared to Niemeyer’s, almost all other architecture seems sombre and

unnecessarily laboursome. The weather plays a part in this. Brasília is located on a
savannah-like plateau. It is an outdoor city: everything one would do indoors
elsewhere can be done outdoors in Brasília, all year long. The architecture is
unencumbered by the tasks assigned to it in the North – preserving warmth – or in the
South – cooling down. A paper-thin membrane, a single pane of glass, suffices to
mark the boundary between indoors and outdoors.
Costa’s ‘plane’ touched ground in the exact centre of the country. This is for political
reasons. The idea was to shift the focus from Brazil’s overpopulated coast to its
unexplored interior. The success of this project is shown, paradoxically, by the fact
that this most recent example of intensive master planning – intended for 500,000
inhabitants – is now surrounded by a shapeless blob of a city with 3.5 million
inhabitants, grown into being according to the laws of the market economy.

The exemplary ‘airplane’ has become no more than a neighbourhood, embedded in a

much larger and generic city. As a result, the first impression when looking at this
layout is not its authoritarian character, but the vulnerability of modern architecture…

The gargantuan political power employed to make Brasília possible has succumbed to
the even greater force of the market tsunami. The market, a growing force since the
80s, makes quick work of fragile political statements such as Brasília. No matter how
authoritarian the old Brasília may look when seen from the sky, the market regime will
always come out on top, more authoritarian even in its randomness.

Does this matter? No. We must simply conclude that the essence of Brasília does not
consist of its architecture, but of the decision to move Brazil’s government inland.

Brasília is not a disappointment, but neither is it a baffling reencounter with an old,

singular ideal. It’s a final spasm rather than a new dawn. A confirmation that this ideal
has lost its credibility for the time to come…

The rigid organisation of the city has had unpredictable results: Brasília has become a
record-holder in insanity, divorce, and fatal traffic accidents (perfect roads, bad
drivers, no speed limit). As all diplomats were housed in one and the same apartment
block, those concrete towers became the birth ground of the punk movement in Brazil
in the 80s: a high concentration of international teenagers with the right kind of music
tapes.

The clear structure of the city made it relatively easy for the military junta to take over
the city in 1964: Brasília became an orthogonal panopticon – a singular utopia as a
substratum for dictatorship.
Heritage

The wings of Brasília’s plane layout remain unfinished, but the whole project was put
on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1987 anyway. What started fifty years ago as
the prototype of a new era has now become a relic of the past. The design is highly
relevant today, fascinating even, albeit for very different reasons: how do you
‘preserve’ that which is modern, or in other words, how do you stop modernity in its
tracks?

The lobbying work for Brasília’s status as a World Heritage Site started immediately
after the first portion was delivered, headed by president Kubitschek himself. This
makes him a two-fold visionary: not only did he build the new capital, he also
managed to have this feat recorded for posterity by UNESCO. But how can modernity
be held on to? According to UNESCO, the fuselage and the wings of Brasília’s layout
must be preserved forever. The apartments are now home to the city’s wealthiest
inhabitants – the price per square meter is higher than anywhere else in the city,
perhaps because of its World Heritage status.

Bizarrely, the language and typology of modernism have turned out to be untenable
in the areas for which it was originally intended. In Europe, social housing blocks are
being demolished at breakneck speed – yet they flourish in climates and cultures
where they don’t seem to belong: Zanzibar, Singapore, Rio. The 130 blocks in Brasília
have become a refreshing collage of hardcore 60s socialism and neoliberal comfort
zones. A unique amalgam of seemingly incompatible elements.

Greek temples, three thousand neglectful years after being built, are still standing.
They are easy to preserve. A 2,000-year-old villa in Pompeii is still quite inhabitable,
and a home built by Palladio is still bursting with palpable intelligence, five centuries
hence.

The Rietveld Schröder House, on the other hand, is less than a century old, yet it looks
more precarious and less ‘alive’ than its much older counterparts. Modernity is
fundamentally ephemeral; it was never meant to last the ages. Modern architecture is,
at best, a minimal membrane separating part of a space in order to make it
temporarily useful for a specific purpose. The aesthetics of modernity is a
constellation of nuances, each meant to be transient.
UNESCO often threatens to strip a site of its status when it or its surroundings are
becoming too drastically or too visibly modern. Dresden lost its status because of a
new bridge that was thought to threaten the beauty of its protected riverbank
landscape. Saint Petersburg is at risk of losing it because of the construction of a
Gazprom tower.

Tiring of these endless frontline battles, UNESCO is developing a new definition of the
Historic Urban Landscape: heritage is no longer considered as a single object or a
single urban ensemble, but as ‘all natural and historical layers of a site, its empty
spaces, its infrastructure, and its social, cultural, and economic processes’. Brasília
might be one of the most interesting tests for this new definition.

In CRONOCAOS [1], we concluded that the interval between ‘now’ and that which has
been ‘preserved’ is shrinking continuously. Shortly, heritage might even acquire a
prospective character instead of a retrospective one.

In Brasília, this is already happening. A federal ukase from 1992 demands that any
addition to the ‘plane’ be designed by Niemeyer himself (at that time, 85 years old).
From this moment, Niemeyer’s future plans were automatically considered World
Heritage. And this might make him the biggest threat to his own posthumous
reputation: Niemeyer’s most recent additions are nonchalant, sometimes grim,
seldom convincing, and always situated somewhere in the wide range between the
sublime and the worthless. Just as the ‘older De Kooning’, his recent work makes one
wonder whether there still is a functioning mind guiding the master’s hand, or
whether the hand has taken over.
UFO

Concluding, I have to admit I am curious about the ‘wrong’ Brasília. As it turns out, this
epicentre of modernity – a former minister called it the ‘Capital in the Age of Aquarius’
– allows room for bureaucracy as well as the largest concentration of sects and
mystics.

The largest sect, Vale Do Amanhecer, was founded by Tia Neiva, a female truck driver
who was one of the city’s first pioneers. Nowhere on the planet, the sect claims, is the
Earth’s crust thinner – and therefore the distance between the surface and the Earth’s
molten core shorter – than here in Brasília. An excellent attraction, not only for
credulous earthlings, but also for flying saucers which, hovering over a lake, charge
themselves with the globe’s energy and might decide to land upon the water.

The sect’s headquarters looks like an ultra-serious playground, a labyrinth of slight

curves that were drawn onto the ground by the founders themselves – and which
doesn’t differ too much from Niemeyer’s recent work. At sunset, adepts in Star Trek
costumes join in the UFO ballet.

And I find myself secretly wishing I could believe in either architecture or flying
saucers.
END

REM KOOLHAAS,

Dutch architect; Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate (2000); co-founder and partner
of OMA

NOTES:

[1] The ‘preservation’ of Brasília touches upon my current interest in heritage, which,
amongst other publications, was put into words in CRONOCAOS, a heritage
manifesto for last year’s Biennale in Venice.
CRONOCAOS is about the astounding portion of the planet today that is, in one way
or another, subject to ‘preservation’, the safeguarding and protection of cultural and
natural heritage. According to our most scrupulous count, this concerns twelve
percent of the Earth’s surface today. The world has not given enough thought to this
new and growing circumstance: in the future, half the world will have to change
radically in order to meet the new demands of life on this planet, whereas the other
half will be unavoidably stuck in the past. A stagnation of which Amsterdam’s ring of
canals is now part as well, since its surprisingly unnoticed recognition by UNESCO.

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