For a recent number of Modulo, the Brasilian architectural magazine, Niemeyer wrote an article called “Testimony,” lofty in tone but uneasy as to logic, about his work for Brasília. Politically he is a communist and in his “testimony” he takes himself to task for his past errors and promises to do better in the future, in the best communist manner. He says he still believes “that until there is a just distribution of wealth — which can reach all sectors of the population — the basic objective of architecture, that is, its social foundation, will be sacrificed, and the role of architect will be relegated to waiting upon the whims of the wealthy classes.” He confesses to having done this in the past, to having thought of architecture as a “game” and even having deliberately built houses with eccentricities and extravagances for their rich owners “to talk about.” But from now on, he says, things will be different; he intends that his works for Brasília shall all be “useful and permanent and capable of evoking a little beauty and emotion.”
It might strike a critical visitor as ironical that for over two years thousands of workers have been left to build wooden houses or shacks and shift for themselves, while the first two buildings to be completed should both be called “Palace.” However, to be fair, besides the Free City, attempts are being made to provide decent housing for workers and white-collar workers. Two blocks of five hundred houses each, “row” houses, designed by Niemeyer, have already been built by the Fundação da Casa Popular, and five “superblocks” of apartments are now going up, financed by five of the Brasilian institutos, a form of syndicate peculiar to Brasil, handling pensions, hospitalization, or loans, or functioning, as in this case, as banks.
At the end of four years, when enough housing will have been completed, the Free City is supposed to be razed; in fact, by then, one branch of the artificial lake is supposed to be rippling above its streets. Those most violently opposed to Brasília cynically predict that the Free City will never be razed; that it will remain and probably grow, the slums of the future city, like the wild and uncontrollable growth of shacks that now surrounds Rio de Janeiro.
(Also to be fair it should be explained that although the word “palace” for a president’s residence may sound strange to American ears, in Latin countries the word does not have the overtones of royalty it has for us. It can mean merely “mansion,” and palacete, “small palace,” is often used for any large house.)
Surely it is to Kubitschek’s credit that he has probably the most sophisticated taste in architecture of any head of any government. Educated Brasilians are apt to feel that although their country is in a bad transitional period, backwards in many respects, and may not have made much of a stir in the other arts, it has reason to be proud of its contemporary architecture. The outstandingly beautiful Ministry of Education building in Rio was begun in 1937, the very first and still one of the very few government buildings to be commissioned in modern international style. (Chandigarh was not begun until almost fifteen years later.) After all, Kubitschek could have chosen to build an Old Colonial capital, or a Greek-and-Roman, or even one in a particularly monstrous Swiss-chalet style that has sometimes been thought appropriate for Brasil. But as far as his choice of style goes the only objections I have heard of have been from the Army, which does not feel that an airy, glassy, or floating edifice will represent its view of things. But perhaps all generals secretly yearn for crenellations and drawbridges.
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A friend of mine, a Rio interior decorator who had just finished doing up the new hotel, had made reservations for me by two-way radio. The Brasília Palace Hotel is in one block, a hundred and thirty-five rooms, one room thick and three stories high; only a small central section rests on the ground, the rest of the building on either side being supported by concrete pillars covered with black-anodized aluminum. At night these pillars almost disappear and the hotel appears to float like a luxury-liner, an effect that seems to be dear to Niemeyer’s heart these days.
The entrance, reminding me vaguely of a New York subway entrance, is down a flight of steps into a sunken lobby; over it, at ground level, is a large, pleasant lounge, full of Saarinen chairs and marble-topped coffee-tables. The three floors of rooms face east to the Palace of the Dawn; three corridors run the full length of the west side of the building. There is one public staircase, about four feet wide, and two small elevators (one was not working when we were there), each holding at the most six people, so that there will certainly be serious traffic problems when the hotel is filled with its quota of three hundred guests. The entire west wall is made of large blocks of cement, five inches or so thick, and regularly set into each block are rows of little round glasses — real drinking glasses, the bell boys like to inform one — their circle-ridged bottoms sealing the wall on the outside. They let in the light in thousands of spots on the walls and gray carpeting of the corridors, an effect that is extremely pretty but unfortunately, from the moment the sun starts down the western sky until early next morning, fiendishly hot. Also, I wondered how could the insides of all those little glasses ever be cleaned? Already the more casual type of guest had begun to leave cigarette butts and other odds and ends in those within reach. Between each floor a row of blocks has been left without the glasses; the holes open into an airspace above the halls, where small screened openings alternate with light fixtures along the ceilings. This is supposed to provide ventilation, but not a breath of air came from the vents, and at night, when I walked the corridor to my room at the very end, before reaching its white formica doorway I would be dizzy from the heat. The bathroom ceilings are pierced with holes into this common airspace, too, with the unhappy result that one clearly hears the man next door taking his bath, limb by limb. The rooms, however, are large and cool, and except for the dressing-tables, well furnished. In the dressing-table mirrors a woman of barely average height (myself) sees only her chin.
Between the hotel block and the dining-room wing is a small space about as big as a tennis court and here grass had been planted and was being watered. Otherwise, in front and in back of the hotel, and for the half-mile tract between it and the presidential palace, the red dust blew unchecked. (A week or so after this, when President Gronchi of Italy visited Brasília, a thin layer of cement was poured over the area in front of the Palace.) Dust seeped into the hotel, tingeing the carpets and one’s clothing and the gray marble floor of the lounge was powdered with it. I watched a workman trying to clean this floor with an electric polishing machine. After producing a few big spirals edged with banks of red dust, he gave up the attempt.
This particular floor comes to an end in a free-form curve four feet higher than the floor of the dining-room, into which the lounge opens. Plants and cacti hide coyly beneath the overhang, invisible from the lounge. The one occasion on our trip when I saw Aldous Huxley openly irritated was when, just after he arrived the next day, he started walking down the lounge, against the light, and almost fell over this drop. He showed distinct signs of anger, for him, and remarked that the handrail had been in use for some thousands of years and it seemed “a shame to abandon such a useful invention.”