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1994
Brazil - South America
Bec2004-09-20 17:46:11
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with its 15 million people a little intimidating after months of visiting villages, towns and more human sized cities.
Brasília
Brasilia is not oversized like Săo Paulo but it is entirely artificial. It is a city without history that was built in three years just in time to become the capital in 1960.
President Kubitscheck got himself a big ego trip and his acomplices (urbanist Lucio Costa, architect Oscar Niemeyer and landscaper Burle Marx), had a wet dream letting their imagination loose aiming to impress but they gave little consideration to the practical aspects of urban life.
The entrance to Brazil's "pentagon" (military center) is a success as far as being impressive goes.
Great architecture is a pleasure for the eyes wherever it is and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs certainly is great architecture...
Wide open spaces are always impressive, like Tienanmen Square, or the Red Square. They exalt the power that inhabits them by reducing the individuals who chance to venture there to insignificant proportions.
Everything is squeaky clean in this new artificial city, even the cheap hotels like this one where I stayed for 16 dollars. I met a young man who brought me to meet his parents in a standard modular apartment some distance from the center. I gathered from our conversations that Brasilia was nicer to look at than to live in for it was difficult for anyone not born here to adapt to the sterile, standardized lifestyle that the city imposes on its captive civil servant population (of which the higher ranking spend every weekend elsewhere).
personally I think that is a serious mistake to isolate civil servants in a capital where the only business is government business because of the inevitable intellectual inbreeding that results. I know for I have experienced it, I was raised in Ottawa and I have worked 10 years in Quebec City. There is very little else than government related activities in those two capitals. Civil servants living in those ivory towers are cut off from the economic reality of industry, agriculture and commerce. As I have seen it, Brasília is only an ivory tower.
Copyright Bernard Cloutier
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See photographs from:
Brazil Gallery
