Whoever may be right time will tell, but Brasília is President Kubitschek’s dream. He announced that eventually someone would have to keep the promise made the country in the Constitution in 1891, and he is going to keep it now. His five-year term has two more years to run; on April twenty-first, 1960, the government is supposed to make the great move.
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I arrived there alone on a Friday afternoon clutching a piece of paper bearing the name of the man, a relative of someone important, who was supposed to meet me but never did. The first thing that greeted my eyes as I got off the plane was a three-throned shoe-shine stand against the wall of the small airport building. At the moment I was not in need of a shoe-shine but all departing passengers certainly were. To be sure, it was the tail-end of the dry season, but in the later summer of 1958 one’s first and last impression of Brasília was of miles and miles and miles of blowing red dust.
Inside, the airport is a fair sample of the workaday atmosphere of the greater part of Brasília so far — rather like that of a small bus-station in the United States, a far-west bus station. Men in jeans, wide-brimmed felt hats and high boots, mill about drinking coffee and beer and eating stale pastries. (Women are still scarce in Brasília and I had been the only one on the plane.) There is a small general-store section of battered cans of milk, sardines, and hearts of palm, ropes of dry red sausage, bottles of cachaça, sunglasses, headache remedies, and yesterday’s newspapers. On the wall is a line of little silk banners bearing the magic word BRASÍLIA, and also for sale are plastic plaques embossed in gold with the same word and, in profile, the head from which all this has sprung: Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira, in a blur of gold.
The four or five men, looking like engineers — one had a big T-square under his arm — who had arrived with me all got into jeeps and were driven off in clouds of dust. Finally I gave up waiting for my mentor and took the cream-colored Volkswagen Microbus lettered “Brasília Palace Hotel” and was driven off, too, the only passenger. It is over twelve miles from the airport to the hotel; it was a warm, clear day and we drove very fast over the bumpy dirt road.
The site of Brasília is an empty, barren, slightly rolling plateau, four thousand feet above sea-level. The place had been described to me, but I was not prepared for quite such dreariness and desolation: compared with almost any other inhabitable part of this fantastically beautiful country it seems really remarkably unattractive and unpromising. There are no mountains nor even real hills, no rivers, at least not in evidence (there is a small one some miles away and two small streams), no trees of any size, no feeling of height, nor grandeur, nor security, nor fertility, nor even just picturesqueness; not one of the qualities one thinks of as capable of giving a city charm or character. It reminded me, and other members of the party later said it reminded them, of the depressing landscape around Madrid. The two gifts Mother Nature seems to have bestowed on Brasília so far are sky and space, and when one imagines these endless swelling plains covered over with modern white government buildings, monuments, skyscrapers, shops, and apartment houses, the way they are eventually supposed to be, the only natural beauty left it is the sky. Of course there is now to be an artificial lake; there is even a yacht club marked on the map of the city; and friends who have been there in the rainy season say that it is very beautiful to see the rain-storms coming across the plains, from miles away. But for anyone accustomed to the hyper-glamorous beauty of Rio de Janeiro, where miles of white beaches, or even a view of the bay at the end of a city street, can make up for most of the city’s shortcomings, Brasília seems like a sad come-down.
There are a few clumps of palms here and there, but in general the vegetation consists of sparse, scrubby trees, mostly a variety known as “apricot,” which bears small wild fruits, no relation, however, to the true apricot. As far off the road as the eye can see these trees and the coarse grass are coated with the red dust constantly stirred up by passing trucks. Growing out of almost every thin trunk, half-way up, hideous and bigger than a man’s head, is a white ants’, or termites’ nest. When I asked my driver, a depressed, dust-covered young man, about them he said dryly that termites build half-way up the trees to be that much nearer the fruit. Miles apart, a few clusters of roofs can be seen, colonies of the construction workers and other new inhabitants. By far the biggest of these is the “Nucleus of Pioneers,” or “Flagbearers,” to translate its romantic name literally, commonly called simply the Free City. This was officially opened in February 1957, with four hundred people, and now has, incredibly and encouragingly, forty-five thousand. “All built of wood,” said the driver, and we heard that phrase many times because in a Latin country of stone, marble, tiles, and plaster, a whole city deliberately built of wood is a curiosity. “And it certainly is free,” he added, and that was his last remark until we reached the hotel.
Oscar Niemeyer, world-famous architect, has been a friend of President Kubitschek ever since building a house for him, the first modern house in Belo Horizonte, when Kubitschek was mayor of that city. Later, when Kubitschek was governor of the state of Minas Gerais, he commissioned Niemeyer to build the resort of Pampulha, just outside Belo Horizonte, which is the state’s capital. Now Niemeyer is responsible for all public buildings to be built in Brasília. In 1956 a competition was held for a “pilot-plan” for the new city of five hundred thousand people. It was any architect’s dream come true, and dozens of plans were submitted, some extremely elaborate and detailed, down to suburbs and agricultural belts. Lucio Costa, Brasil’s leading older architect and a friend and sponsor of Niemeyer since his student days, felt that at that early stage nothing very detailed should be attempted. He submitted only five or six little sketches, drawn rapidly, apparently, on small sheets of an inferior grade of paper. But his pilot-plan was immediately recognized as a brilliant little tour de force, and it was unanimously awarded the first prize, equal to about fourteen thousand dollars.
Following it, the city is laid out in the form of an aeroplane, or is it a bird, heading east, with a body seven or eight miles long. The wings, seven and a half miles across, will be the residential districts; the shopping center is at the tail; the body contains banks and office-buildings; along about the thorax come the foreign ministries, and the head is the “Esplanade of the Three Powers”: Judiciary, Administrative, and Executive — this last being, on paper, Niemeyer’s most spectacular and ambitious project to date. Set apart from the aeroplane or bird, to the east of its head, are the Brasília Palace Hotel and the Palácio da Alvorada (or “Palace of the Dawn”), the presidential residence, the only two large buildings completed at present; indeed, except for one small church and the foundations or skeletons of five blocks of apartment houses, they are almost the only permanent buildings to be seen.