Introduction
In Brazil, a crisis of national identity was expressed through a loss of its characteristics. The city of Brasília, created in 1960 as the country’s new federal and administrative base, presented as the very first national style of modernist architecture in Latin America; it was a city of the future that achieved an international reputation, albeit with a somewhat inhuman aspect after its completion. A nearly-six-decade distance separates us from the historical moment of both international and Brazilian architecture, embedding us in a certain critical distance that both allows and obliges us to contemplate political movements with a broader perspective (Peirano, 2005).
The dynamic transformation of Brazil’s modern architecture can be divided into three stages: 1) the high modernism of the 1930s; 2) the well-known productively heroic period of the 1940s-1950s; 3) post-Brasília from 1964 up to contemporary developments. A colonial presence is arguably ambivalent from a provincial perspective; hence this essay will focus on the second phase of modernist architecture movement in Brasília.
Brasília was no doubt pioneering amongst Latin American countries and beyond, and many years ahead of its time. It was the first city ever built that was designed from an aerial viewpoint. The design of Brasília evokes the image of an airplane, which is surely one of the most strategically surreal layouts. From a high vantage point, it is possible to see the city spread out from its central landmark – the monumental axis – like an octopus with tentacles reaching out, and its outspread wings established with its residential and commercial blocks are lined with modern buildings of a distinctly rational order; an ambitious grid alongside the simplified architectural structure and futuristic facades.
Although there was, clearly, an attempt to assimilate Brasília into Brazil’s wider cultural reference points in order to both reassure and control Brazilians, the architectural landscape which was deliberately designed to be symmetrical and harmonious was itself an invisible system, giving effective command and control to those above (Jameson, 2005). This systematically structured (and more or less oversimplified) zoning pattern was not merely a symbolic gesture; it was a real and productive force for authority. In a phenomenological sense, this act arguably deprived subjects of their objective beings. By so doing, it hindered the residents of Brasília from shaping their own urban memory in the phenomenology of everyday life, something that eventually that took its toll. (Jacobs, 1961).
Particularly in the post-colonial era, there was a great desire to create an identifiable asset that was as purely Brazilian as possible, something that arguably sprang from Brazil’s history. The national identity remained ambiguous and fluid because Brazil had been the site of encounters, clashes, miscegenation and other interactions between the indigenous population, European invaders, and the slaves the Europeans had brought from Africa (Peirano, 2005). Nonetheless, the confusion of Brazilian identity resided in its racial diversity and the large mixed-race population (Gilberto Freyre, 1930). The origin of this crisis of identity can be traced back to the first century after Brazil’s independence. The colonial Portuguese dogma that had been theoretically advocated in segregation resulted in an emergence of a hybrid cultural identity of ‘Brazilianness’ instead of one of “assimilation” (Peirano, 2005).
As we shall see from this paper gives an overview of the national narrative of Brazil through investigating colonial power in the construction of national identity in the post-colonial age. It goes on to depict how we might conceive of this narrative as being spatial and visual, characterized by rapid urban reformation – in particular in the case of the planned city of Brasília, which can be seen as a transition from a radically utopian idea into an unexpected hotbed for authoritarian regimes. The myth of utopian design intends to “make the viewer dream into the picture, which awaits the viewer’s desires and pleasures in order to be completed” (Alan Pomering (2013), in terms of that which binds imagination and creation. According to Jameson (2005), “utopia, as a political concept, exceeds the realm of political theory and has become part of realms beyond the political imagination, Modernism, and its relationship with modernity”.
In the past few decades, new strategies within architecture and urban design have gradually emerged as ways to rethink attitudes towards visual regimes and urban ideologies, especially in terms of ‘decolonising’ colonial power, knowledge and being. Decolonising as a kind of ‘memory’ of colonial power is central to a discussion of how architecture and urbanism have been engaged in the enforcement of political control in a post-colonial era. This essay attempts to make sense of the practice of decolonising in the context of the history of architecture and urbanism in Brazil; this develops into a narrative of adaptive strategies that are closely related to changing urban policies.
The first attempt to introduce Brazilianness to the public was in 1939 at the New York World’s Fair of the Brazilian pavilion, with the exhibition Brazilian Spirit. It was created by one of the key figures in the development of modern architecture, the renowned Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer. The title of the exhibition expressed a representation of the spirit of Brazil through its nationalistic architecture (Behrendt, 1943). The exhibition received relatively little attention in its early stages. Four years later, following a collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art and the accompanying book Brazil Builds, this exhibition received a reasonable reputation which marked a turning point in perceptions of Brazilian identity abroad. Paradoxically, however, the Brazilianness in Brazilian architectural terms followed from being ‘discovered again’ by the Americans; this modernist characteristic was most likely “an American creation that served American political purposes”, taking place at that particular moment in between two World Wars (Peirano, 2005). Architecture and urban design often reflect socio-political conditions, and Brazilian politicians and intellectuals sought to address the Brazilian identity crisis through means such as the Brazilian Spirit exhibition. Arguably, the expression of modernist Brazilianness in architectural terms, to label their modernist endeavour became its first priority concern. Nonetheless, through this labelling practice only reinforces the status quo (Behrendt, 1943).
Since the nation had been struggling with constructing a coherent national identity, in 1956 a new expression of cultural identity through architecture was created in the new city of Brasília, designed by Niemeyer. This revolutionary campaign was proposed by the populist Brazilian President Juescelino Kubitschek. The idea of urban planning was initiated in an effort to cleanse Brazil of its colonial past, and with an attempt create a new Brazilian spirit. For example, a planned prerequisite was that the city’s architects, engineers, planners and resources must be exclusively Brazilian (Ernesto Silva, Historia de Brasilia; Coordenada, 1961). However, paradoxically, there was an unavoidable tendency to appropriate European styles to develop an ultra-modernist style of architecture in a Latin American context: the reinforced concrete techniques and its architectural qualities were applied which were imported from these European-born (or trained) architects and engineers in order to produce buildings that “equal to or even superior” to those produced in the rest of developed world (Forty, 2012). In this sense we can see the arrival of concrete and the technique of cementing as being on the threshold of a new chapter in Brazilian industrialised era.
From the start of Kubitschek’s ambitious campaign, he promised his people that he would condense “Fifty years (of progress) in five” both in the advancement of industrialisation and being self-sustaining in economic growth. Brasília was an unprecedented scheme in city planning, without any parallel in modern civilization. The transformation in the national attitude was so profound that the New York Times even reported that “Kubitschek has given Brazilians a national pride that never existed before”; the use of modern movement architecture in the city’s planning encouraged international recognition, and gave it a certain legitimacy. The city Brasília demonstrates the continued dominance of the Western canon.
The importance of ground plans is often overseen in the implementation of urban policy. Essentially, there is no doubt that the innovative and revolutionary urban planning employed at Brasília was deeply influenced by Le Corbusier’s bourgeois thought. As Jameson (2005) pointed out that Le Corbusier was inspired by the spectacle of total military mobilization during World War I, as regards the elementary design principles of dwellings should place more weight on rational concerns. He explicitly stated that his “city was the rational expression of a machine-age consciousness, it is what modern man would embrace wholeheartedly”. In terms of the structure of zoning patterns, as long as one is familiar with a Le Corbusier city, then s/he would be able to recognise where the “monumental axis” is established. The fundamental step of ideal spatial planning is inserting a monumental axis at the centre of the capital. Within this framework, one has to see Brasília as a whole body of structure in a systematic order. Following Le Corbusier’s discipline, as he propounded in the doctrine of CIAM, “each man will live in an ordered relation to the whole as one’s status can be directly read from one’s distance from the centre”, as an extension of the so-called “urban hierarchy”. The very act of creating a zoning system implies a power over people, most particularly over the way in which places, their inhabitants and their social functions get represented; and once allocated, these zones are restrictive and tend to segregate inhabitants.
Obsession with modernity amongst Kubitschek and other Brazilian modernist architects such as Oscar Niemeyer and Roberto Burle Marx can be read as a powerful reaction against Brazil’s colonial past, marking a shift in the spatial position. The whole point of realising this ultra-modernist capital was showcasing a new Brazilian identity for future generations and transforming the physical environment for its new modern citizens. However, using the insights of Jameson (2005) can give a better understanding of why its principles were severely attacked by critics such as Bruno Zevi and Sibyl Moholy–Nagy, as they argued that “high modernism implies a rejection of the past as a model to improve upon and a desire to make a completely fresh start”; that is to say, “the more utopian the high modernism, the more thoroughgoing its implied critique of the existing society” (Holbraad et al., 2009). In this sense, this administrative rationale cultivated alienation and amnesia. Within the framework, if we judge it by its capacity to render a tangible Brazilianness in architectural terms, then its success was considerable, as initially Kubitschek’s Brasília stood in contrast to the corruption, backwardness, and ignorance of the old Brazil.
In 1964, a military coup with support from the United States saw the city become the seat of the new authoritarian regime; its modernization policy was arguably translated architecturally in the overly simplified quality of architectural structures and zoning patterns (Behrendt, 1943; Peirano, 2005, 2005). In a sense, the particular quality of Brasília’s built environment can be seen to have enabled the dictator, given that the military coup remained for over two decades (Peirano, 2005) in a similar vein to the earlier European domination of the New World. The acquisition of modernist technology allowed Brazilian architecture to be given a sense of freedom, but nonetheless its freedom was simultaneously derived from the West. nevertheless, Le Corbusier and the CIAM doctrine could arguably have played a role of propaganda in the act of modern violence. The spiralling deficit accumulated by ‘the city of future’ drove the economy into a deep and damaging recession, and saw the Brazilian government’s fall into political and economic turmoil, and damaged the Brazilian government’s international legitimacy. Ultimately, Kubitschek’s Brasília failed to unite the national consciousness (Jacobs, 1961).
Because Brasília, in many respects, was the first manifesto of architectural ultra-modernism to have emerged outside the western core (Behrendt, 1943; Peirano, 2005), Brazilianness was therefore first acknowledged worldwide in a modernism context. The terms behind Brazilian architecture and Brazilianness were arbitrary, articulated and triggered by social actors in determined situations. Following this logic, the great dilemma for Brazilian architecture is confronting the relationship between Brazil’s colonial past and the system of values that originated in –and were largely regulated from – the West. The measure of its success or failure, ultimately, lay in how it was recognised by the rest of the world, of which by far the most important was the United States. To be modern is to live a life of paradox and contradiction. It is to be overpowered by the immense bureaucratic organizations that have the power to control and often to destroy all communities, values, lives; and yet to be undeterred in our determination to face these forces, to fight to change their world and make it our own. (Berman, 1970)
The urban reformation of Brasília was completed at breathtaking speed and the most essential bureaucracies were accommodated without delay. Thanks to the cheap and readily available concrete, the city’s urban fabric transformed into a notably, and perhaps unexpectedly, sensuous architectural landscape. It is noteworthy to mention that this was the time when reinforced concrete techniques had not yet reached maturity in all of Latin America. This provided Kubitschek with the opportunity “to make over its reputation by exporting Brazilian culture and showing off its recent industrial advances”. Indeed, colonial architecture often shares many of the characteristics of its transfer, in terms of “splitting between its appearance as original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and difference (Homi Bhabha, 1994),” hence in the making of Brazilianness these privileged colonial presences became essential, as Niemeyer tried to show us, through the most ubiquitous building material, concrete.
The idea of modernity has a long history in Western philosophical thought. It has a predominant role in the concept of political theory, literature, and in relation to utopian praxis towards discussions on governance, communal living and well-being. In architectural terms, “every country starting out on the journey from backwardness, the opening of the first cement plant was always a historic moment, marking one of the first steps on the ladder of modernisation. The arrival of the capacity to produce cement at once delivered up to that country a constructive capacity that gave it parity with the most developed economies” (Forty, 2012). The experimenting use of concrete in Oscar Niemeyer’s monumental buildings obliterated local vernacular and symbolic idiom acquired from Le Corbusier, made everywhere seem the same. A Brazilian architectural vocabulary was created, with an attempt to show the world that Brasília represented not only “a national declaration of cultural independence” but also a protest against the influence of traditional colonial architectural style, Spanish Baroque and French classicism (Behrendt, 1943).
The old is dying, and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arise a great diversity of morbid symptoms (Antonio Gramsci, cited in Crapanzano, 1986).
Despite the grand, utopian vision of Brasília’s urban redevelopment program, the reality of life in Brasília today is very different, with the lowest economic classes having been expunged from the centre of the capital to live in shanty towns; there is a chasm between romanticism and reality. There were significant failings to recognise that the nature of a successful city is that it is organic, that its success is often in its incompleteness, and to see complex systems of functional order as order instead of chaos (Jacob, 1961). Initially, Brasilia was planned for a population of just 500,000, but this has risen to 2.8 million and more than four million including satellite towns. “There are several suburbs – of these distinctly unplanned settlements – where one will find a life and a spirit very different to that of the elegant set-piece architecture and rational street plans of central Brasilia itself. Where, though, in a traditional city these satellite settlements would form a part of an urban whole – the ‘east ends’ of a city – here they are cut off from the core of the capital” ( Scott, 1997). More precisely, the zoning pattern had a social dimension. It became a valuable tool to delve deeply into the complexities of cultural negotiation and creativity that surpass modern conceptions of nation. Although the idea of Brasília was created out of a progressive and democratic government, the urban plan revealed a conflict between what the planned Brasília meant for capitalist economy on one hand – to serve authority and the privileged – versus the other – the socially immobilised, negotiated in the context of Fordism (Debord, 1967).
Case Study
Another perspective on ‘placemaking’ can be obtained through films, which are a useful resource to understand changes in the urban fabric because of their ability to provide multidimensional information both spatially and temporally. It is possible to understand changes within Brasília’s architectural landscape by working with films as sources containing elements of interpretation, such as who the actors are within the urban fabric. Such an understanding may lead to a better comprehension of the present through this lens. The film lens on the architectural landscape correlates with the power relationship between ruler (i.e., the ideological, political and economic) and his gaze onto the city (i.e., the citizen).
It is not accidental that Brasília became an aesthetic symbol of nihilism in the cinematic term. The ‘truthful’ representation of Brasília was depicted by the Brazilian Director Fernando Campos in his archive film Circa (1957). The film illustrates how the geopolitics of modernity and the concept of spectacle have directly been involved in the decision-making of which narrative history or memory to forget and suppress, and which is central or peripheral. As we shall notice from Circa, Brasília was built to be traversed not on foot but in a motorcar, highlighting the modern, progressive notion of the glorious “machinery of representation” in industrial society. This notion of the gaze appeared as a recurrent phenomenon in Latin America from the time of its adoption in the spatial sense to emphasize the systematic and regularized nature of authoritarians. These views make use of an understanding of the politics of display, and how it is much more than an instrument of delivering an idea or a statement but is a combining of symbolic metaphors to juxtapose history and reality. Given that visual technologies are never neutral in terms of the subjective experience (Debord, 1967), it is of interest that the film director Fernando Campos was a Portuguese-speaker who made a conscious decision to dub the film into French. The film was in effect a marketing pitch to European investors. In a spatial sense, whole scenarios were established from a motor car which allowed audiences to situate themselves within the space. It is clear that the film was made as part of a larger social transformation urbanity project, and turned from visual form and narrative into function.
References
Behrendt, Walter Curt. Book reviews – “Philip L. Goodwin, Brazil Builds. Architecture New and Old, 1652–1942 (Photographs by G. E. Kidder Smith), published by the Museum of Modern Art, 1943
Berman. Marshall, The politics of authenticity, 1970
Bhabha. Homi, The location of culture, 1994
Debord. Guy, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967
Forty. Adrian, Concrete and Culture: A Material History, 2012
Jacob, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961
Huyssen, Andreas. Nostalgia for Ruins, Grey Room, No. 23 (Spring, 2006), pp. 6-21
PEIRANO, Mariza. A guide to anthropology in Brazil. in: Vibrant – Virtual Brazilian Anthropology, v. 2, 2005. [Available at http://www.vibrant.org.br/issues/v2n1/mariza-peirano-a-guide-to-anthropology-in-brazil/]
Scott. James, Seeing Like a State, 1998
ARCHIVE FILM: Ministerio da Educacão e Cultura & Insituto Nacional de Cine Educativo (INCE), Brasília Planejamento urbano, Brazil, Director Fernando Campos. Circa 1957
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