The construction of the new capital of Brazil, Brasília, is a heroic story on a par with the moon landings: it has been with good reason a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1989. But the UNESCO decree covered only the area described by the Plano Piloto or Pilot Plan, Lucio Costa’s winning 1957 design: that is to say it celebrates everything Costa imagined that year, but not much else. The city therefore has a tendency to be frozen in time; images of it, even in recent publications, largely date from the few days around inauguration in April 1960. They are amazing, but pander to a foreign taste for the exotic, and – particularly – for the ruin. Outside of Brazil, very little has been said about the city as it has subsequently developed, apart from a few anthropological studies of the informal periphery which in their depiction of a resolutely unplanned, violent, poor and place themselves contribute to the city’s exoticisation (2).

In this climate, the few accounts that do appear of the city outside of Brazil present it as something bizarre and faintly disgusting, left over and out of place, like a species of dinosaur.

Inside Brazil, the capital is frozen in history, but different, but related, reasons – namely its association with the military regime after the coup in 1964 (designed by liberal communists, Brasília turned out to be an army paradise – lots of space for parades). A Brazilian architecture critic Ruth Verde Zein wrote that as a student in São Paulo in the 1960s she was taught by professors, who told them, disingenuously, that “after Brasília nothing happened”. While themselves building furiously in the capital, the same professors inculcated the view that Brasília was in effect contaminated, a place which would only interest the “wicked and reactionary.” (3)

Yet Brasilia is a material fact: a vast and complex metropolitan region, 100km from one end to the other, and now counting a population of three million and rising. What I want to do here therefore is deal with one aspect of the city now, focusing on the way in which its periphery – for years the locus of anxieties about the city’s perceived failure – has become, in effect normal.  I will show, through images, how some parts of the periphery have taken up the architectural language of the now historic centre – but how they have modified (some would say corrupted) it for less idealistic times. The capital I represent here is not the one usually found in Anglophone discourse: that is, a modernist ruin encircled by squatter camps, a dystopia defined by a violent and unruly periphery. Instead it is a city actively drawing on, and reinventing its modernist past.

Águas Claras

For this counter-history, let us look in detail at the case of Águas Claras. This is a middle class suburb officially incorporated into the federal district in May 2003, but under construction since the early 1990s. It lies about 15 km to the southwest of the Plano Piloto, and is nominally a satellite of the much longer-established Taguatingua, now a city of half a million. The incidence of new construction is remarkable by any standards: it is a forest of cranes. New point blocks sprout everywhere from the red soil – the city authorities claim 2,500 new apartments per year - where there aren’t new buildings, there are hoardings for buildings. (4) It has 40,000 residents, rising by 10,000 or so each year, and is projected to grow to 240,000 with in a decade. In population terms, it will therefore shortly overtake the stagnant Plano Piloto, while as visual image, parts of Águas Claras already have the scale and density of new development in São Paolo or Belo Horizonte. It is an astonishing sight, perhaps because it is so unexpected: an enormous new city springing out of the scrubby cerrado without fanfare, without signature architects involved, without much, if any, media attention, bar the inevitable advertisements in the local press. It has, so far, eluded academic discussion. As the geographer John Dickenson has remarked, the tendency of studies of Latin American urbanism to focus on questions of social marginality has meant that large parts of the urban experience have often been ignored. Developments such as Águas Claras fall into this category. (5)

The origins of Águas Claras lie in a masterplan commissioned by the Federal District in 1991 from a Brasília-based architect Paolo Zimbres. (6) Zimbres had been asked to plan a dormitory suburb, but argued instead for the new settlement to be a dense piece of urbanism in the European tradition, drawing on the experience of the traditional city centres of Brazilian cities as well as European ones. He titled the plan, optimistically, “an exercise in urbanisation in the Federal District”. Like the Plano Piloto, it was a plan on a grand scale, clear, legible, and self-conscious. In it the city was laid out between two gently curving parallel boulevards 4.5 km in length, with a heavy rail metro line running underground between them. The boulevards would have stores and cultural facilities at ground level, housing above; there were to be 45 new public squares, plus an “ecology park”, in other words, a coherent public realm. The plan’s visual reference points include New York, Milan, and Edinburgh – the latter being where the architect had studied in the early 1970s. They also included the Plano Piloto itself, which Zimbres understood as a fundamentally urban place, if admittedly one that rarely enacted its urbanity. Zimbres advocated density, a mixture of uses, pedestrian movement, the restraint of private cars, the centrality of public transport, streetlife. In a manner that drew on revived continental European traditions as well as Brasilia’s history, he advocated “a mixture of uses on a dense mesh” (7); major elements helping to facilitate this included a street market and a future university. In purely local terms, Águas Claras might be seen as a protected pocket of European-type urbanism in an otherwise largely undifferentiated sprawl. But the ambition was greater: a consolidation and elaboration of what little existing urbanism there was in the metropolis, making a claim on the future in much the same manner as the Plano Piloto.

At the level of plan however, Águas Claras, has an explicit class politics that differentiates it sharply from the Plano Piloto. This is an explicitly middle class city, whose public realm is built to frame the public display of the Europhile bourgeois at leisure: the polite stroll with family, the coffee at the street corner bar, the casual conversation with acquaintances on the street, the hubbub of the urbane crowd. The essential good manners of this place and the rational plan are representations of each other, as it were. Zimbres’s key European visual reference points – Princes St. gardens in Edinburgh, the Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele in Milan - express this class politics clearly, as does the frequent citation of Curitiba, the one Brazilian city to have successfully cultivated a neo-traditional urbanism at its centre. (8) It is also a recognition of the actual condition of the Plano Piloto, which is, de facto, a middle class ghetto, a gated community in all but appearance. (9)

The class character of Águas Claras is the one thing that survives the city’s realisation - indeed it is, if anything, strengthened. Everything else departs somewhat from the masterplan. (10) The plan’s basic outline is maintained, and it keeps the parallel boulevards and the metro and the parks. The mix of uses at ground level survives in a half-hearted way. But the development is now driven by property developers rather than planners, and the plan breaks down at detail level. The metro, to save money, now runs above ground on a heavy and visually intrusive viaduct, so the linear park once imagined over the line cannot exist. On the boulevards, provision is still made for stores and cafés, so the bourgeois public realm survives as folk memory. But the vestigial cafés have mostly given way to car parking. Vehicle security is, you might say, a more urgent consideration in Brazil than the re-enactment of bourgeois European social rituals.

Likewise, the network of public spaces survives at the level of plan, but its detailed implementation denies its original purpose. The spaces exist – they can be found in the interstices between residential towers – but they are privatised, located behind security gates.

What we have at Águas Claras is therefore the corruption of the language and principles of architectural modernism, whilst being, on the surface, a reiteration of them. (11) To see this let us look in detail at The Portal das Andorinhas (“Swallow Gate”) by the Goiânia-based firm, MB Engenharia. (12) This is one of the larger of many large developments, and lies just off the southern boulevard. It consists of four – according to the crude perspectives supplied by the developers – point blocks of 17-18 stories, set in a gated compound, in which sport is well catered for. There’s a football pitch, two outdoor swimming pools, a tennis court, children’s playgrounds,  a sauna, two gyms, various indoor salões de festas, barbecue areas, and extensive gardens. The blocks have a somewhat garish decorative scheme – predominantly white, with thick bands of green, blue and red, a kind of bastard tartan. The individual apartments are big, over 154 square metres, with two receptions, four bedrooms, no less than five bathrooms, a balcony, and quarters for domestic staff. The literature is bullish: this is “one of the ten wonders of Águas Claras”. (13)

Superficially this development deploys the language of architectural modernism; the high-rise point block in open space can be traced back without difficulty to Le Corbusier. (14) The decoration in this case is somewhat baroque – at roof level, the vertical bands continue beyond the roof line turning in the process a piece of two-dimensional patterning at once into a three-dimensional part of the structure, a trompe l’oeil effect clearly forbidden by orthodox modernism. But aside from that, the buildings, as far as we can tell, surprisingly functional looking; there is little here that would identify them as of the early twenty-first century rather than of the early 1960s. And the background in this admittedly sketchy rendering fills in the urban landscape with a series of schematic slabs and towers, all very plain, all set in open parkland.

On the most basic level there is therefore some continuity with Brasilia’s modernism. But the impression breaks down at detail level, so that in practice this is not an extension of the original Brasília as its designer wished, but rather an iteration of the gated communities or condominios fechados that now define the suburbs of Brazilian cities. The detail, then: at ground level, the public spaces of the Zimbres plan exist, and on the rendering are continuous with the space all around – the city in the park, apparently. But look more closely and the development’s four towers are surrounded by a substantial masonry wall, two metres at least in height. This is not then the city in the park of Le Corbusier’s imagination, but something else: a camp, to invoke the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, an exceptional space isolated from the world beyond. (15)

The camp metaphor might be profitably continued: in the modernist imagination, the park had multiple, possibly unlimited uses. It stood precisely in contradistinction to the formalised, ritualised public spaces of the nineteenth century European city, spaces meant as devices to control social life. The modernist space could be defined precisely by its lack of definition. Here at the Portal das Andorinhas, all public space is named, and its purpose defined: here you play tennis, here football, there you drink a caipirinha or take a sauna. All activity is prescribed and regulated; a mass of petty rules no doubt will be, or already is, in operation to attempt to keep these activities within their correct bounds, with security guards, doormen, and committees of residents to oversee their implementation. It is a place of numerous trivial kinds of authority, but authority nonetheless – and it is authority that exists only within the walls which separate the development from the exterior world.

Then there is the question of class. The social levelling of Costa’s Brasília has no place in the marketing of the Portal das Andorinhas, whose landscaping, emphasis on security and leisure, not to mention price all suggest – if not absolutely confirm - an appeal to class values. (16) But a class politics is seen more concretely in the physical layout of the individual apartments. In Brasilia’s Plano Piloto, as James Holston observed, individual apartments were efficient rather than generous, optimised for light and space within a modest floor area, a manifestation of the modernist value of economy. (17) Part of this was the abolition of quarters for serving staff, which in middle class dwellings could be substantial – not only a bed and toilet, but a separate circulation system in the house, and perhaps most importantly, an informal transitional zone called a copa - usually an adjunct to the kitchen - in which the residents of the dwelling and domestic staff could comfortably meet. At Brasília, such spaces were simply abolished, symbolic of the hoped for – but unrealistic and unrealised – transformation to an egalitarian society. (18)

At Águas Claras however, the servants’ quarters – at least in this development – reappear with renewed vigour. Here in the Portal das Andorinhas, there is a suite of reasonable rooms for domestic servants, 15 square metres in all, 30 if the kitchen is included; not only that, but this suite has its own entrance to the apartment, marking, in effect a separate circulation system for domestic staff. The apartment therefore re-establishes all of the traditional social hierarchies of the Brazilian middle-class dwelling – all supposedly abolished by Brasília in 1960.

If this development is an indication, the realisation of Águas Claras is therefore distinctly anti-utopian. Where the architectural vocabulary and the plan suggest a reinforcement of modernism, the project utterly lacks the capital’s utopian basis.

The rhetoric of Brasilia’s authors was both liberatory and levelling, and the architecture was meant to bring about a social revolution. A surprising amount of this vision remains: you can walk unimpeded for miles though the housing blocks in the Plano Piloto. Private and public spaces merge into one another; one is rarely challenged. It is an illusion in large part, for controls exist – but they are furtive and low key. It still seems preferable to the highly privatised space of Águas Claras.

notes

1
European Association of Urban Historians, Stockholm, August 2005

2
See: HOLSTON, James. The modernist city: an anthropological critique of Brasília. Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1989; EPSTEIN, David. Brasilia: plan and reality. A study of planned and spontaneous urban development. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1973.

3
ZEIN, Ruth Verde. "O Lugar da Crítica. Ensaios Oportunos de Arquitetura". Porto Alegre: Editora Ritter dos Reis, 2003, p. 102.

4
http://www.Águasclaras.info/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=12&Itemid=49. Accessed 30 May 2006.

5
John Dickenson, “The Future of the Past in the Latin American City: The Case of Brazil”, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 13, 1 (May 1994) p. 13.

6
Paolo Zimbres, Águas Claras: Um Exercício de Urbanismo no Distrito Federal (1991). Presentation based on masterplan, discussed with Zimbres (26 June 2006).

7
Zimbres’s value system is ultimately not that different from that employed by Leon Krier, or other neo-traditional European architects working at the same time, although the character of individual buildings clearly is different. For a commentary on the revival of traditional urbanism in the early 1990s, see Richard J. Williams, The Anxious City (London: Routledge, 2004) pp. 25-53.

8
Curitiba’s urbanism was masterminded by its architect-mayor Jaime Lerner. For a clear statement of its principles, see Jaime Lerner, Acupunctura Urbana (Rio de Janeiro and São Paolo: Editora Record, 2005). Lerner is cited approvingly by Richard Rogers in Rogers (1996) pp. 59-61.

9
Luiz de Pinedo Quinto jr. e Luiza Naomi Iwakawi, “O canteiro de obras da cidade planejada e o fator de aglomeração” in Aldo Paviani (ed.) A Conquista da Cidade: Movimentos Populares em Brasília (Brasília: Editora UNB, 1991) p. 56.

10
For observations on the realization of Águas Claras, I am grateful to Fred de Holanda.

11
My analysis of commercial development in Águas Claras might be compared with Caldeira’s in São Paolo. See Caldeira (2000) pp. 285-9.

12
http://www.mbengenharia.com.br/. Accessed online 28 August 2006.

13
Publicity material for Portal das Andorinhas, collected 24 June 2006.

14
See “the contemporary city” in Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and its Planning (New York: Dover, 1987) pp. 164ff.

15
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998)

16
Caldeira similarly notes the unashamed appeal to class identity in her analysis of São Paolo. Caldeira (2000) pp. 285-9

17
Le Corbusier was of course one of many to extol the virtues of economy – see the “manual of the dwelling” in Towards a New Architecture (Oxford: Architectural Press, 1989) pp. 122-3.

18
Holston (1989) pp. 177-8. Holston argues that the abolition of servants’ accommodation had unexpected, and (for them) negative consequences. Domestic staff did not disappear with the disappearance of their accommodation, but were either forced to live outside the home and endure an expensive daily commute, or were placed unsuitable accommodation within the apartments – tiny cupboards or closets, meant for the storage of things, not people.

about the author

Richard Williams, professor of the School of Art, Culture and Environment of the University of Edinburgh.