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ORG/)

BRASLIA by REM
KOOLHAAS

Dutch architect writes about the

Brazilian modern city
TEXT REM KOOLHAAS
TRANSLATIONBRAM VAN DER HOUT
REVISION & EDITIONGABRIEL KOGAN & RODRIGO VILLELA

[Editors Note: This was written by Rem Koolhaas on the occasion of his first trip to Braslia in
August of 2011, and has since remained unpublished. Revista Centro (online Brazilian
magazine about architecture, urban studies, art & social science) brings it now in two versions
(English and Portuguese) translated directly from its original language, Dutch. In addition to
offering his first impressions about the modern Brazilian capital, Rem also emphasizes an
autobiographical narrative about the origins of his relation with architecture]

Braslia
In 1956 I dont remember the exact circumstances I happened to come upon an
article in TIME Magazine about the new Braslia. The article unveiled the plans for a cityto-be, right in the centre of the country; a dream of a city that would soon become a
reality. It was there and then that my 11-year-old self made a decision: I was to become
an architect. And not just any architect a Brazilian architect.
What followed were years of sketching and planning emigration plans in particular; a
rather ambitious project for a grammar-school student. Practicality caught up with me,
and for eight years I managed to ignore the Brazilian pull. I became a journalist, and a cowriter of movie scripts. Until the day I realised and this was nothing less than a
revelation to me that an architect is the one who decides the scripts of daily life. My
initial calling rang more clearly in my ears than ever before.
A lot had happened between 1956 the year TIME published its article and 1968. By
this time I was studying architecture in London. My conviction that architecture is a
creative power, one that has led humanity for over three thousand years, was
undermined by doubt and flower power. I became an architect at a moment in time
when the foundations of architecture itself seemed about to crumble.

1968
Generation 1968 was the generation that would set mankind free free from
architecture, amongst other things. The city as a modernist ideal was no longer
conceivable, nor relevant. Order was a dirty word, and had been replaced by selforganisation. Utopias had turned into grim fairytales, used to ward off the incurable
idealism of architecture.

I personally did not join in this collective abdication. On the contrary: I studied the Berlin
Wall, the construction of which was finished in the same year as Braslia, to prove the
continuing power of architecture the power to cut cities and lives in two. This was an
argument that didnt seem to convince anyone at the time
Now, almost half a century later, I am in Braslia, the first city that made me want to build
cities myself. Between 1972 and today, I have passionately researched and written about
world cities: New York, Atlanta, Lagos, Singapore, Chinas Pearl River Delta, even Dubai.
Not as ideal cities, but as cities that exhibit uncontrollable qualities. I have looked at
those cities through the eyes of an anthropologist, rather than from a moralists
perspective. As an architect, I should have rejected them altogether.
Today, however, the city itself is not my main preoccupation anymore. We all know that
the world is urbanising at break-neck speed. The classical city no longer exists; in its
stead, cities with 30 million inhabitants will become the norm during this century. People
are leaving the countryside in ever-growing numbers; I look at what those last inhabitants
have left behind. The countryside, the unknown frontier of change Braslia, then, would
be the last city.

2011
Braslias design has the shape of an airplane with its wings pointing forward. The planes
fuselage consists of two rows of five identical ten-story buildings: one for each Ministry.
The rows are separated by a wide strip of green: the corridor.
The parliament is located in its tail: two raised disks and a platform upon which a dome
the Senate and a flying saucer the House of Representatives have landed.
At the moment of my visit, the wide strip of green has been turned into a sea of red flags
and banners, held by peasants who are singing and shouting in protest against a corrupt
and arbitrary ruling class.
Inside the parliament building, another group of farmers, just as numerous as the ones
outside but clad in green, are being ushered in under the glorious banner of microcredit.
The wings of the city layout consist of over 130 so-called superblocks (superquadras):
rectangular plots of land with an average of nine orthogonally-placed apartment blocks
each, all different yet monotonous a city of 1,500 apartment blocks in total.
Sartre has been here to take a look, as well as Queen Elizabeth, Fidel Castro, Che
Guevara, and Willem Sandberg. Andr Malraux saw the city as a sign of hope; the Pope
gave his blessing, as did most modern architects: Gropius, Le Corbusier, Prouv, Mies van

der Rohe, Nervi.

Juscelino Kubitschek, Brazils president between 1956 and 1960, conceived Braslia as a
military campaign. The airplane was designed by Lucio Costa in 15 days, using paper and
ink. The fuselage was exclusively furbished in only four years with buildings by Oscar
Niemeyer. Niemeyer, afraid of flying himself, travelled between the old capital, Rio de
Janeiro, and the new administrative centre in a Land Rover. Braslia contains an
exceptional number of buildings, produced by one architect, at an insane speed.
His haste and urgency are still palpable. No nonsense, nothing superfluous, no
unnecessary details. Niemeyer had no choice and this may be why he is considered a
genius to this very day.

Oneliner
The word oneliner often has negative connotations. In architecture, however, a sketch
consisting of one flowing line is considered proof of genius. Those oneliners remain
Niemeyers strength or are they his handicap?
In Braslia, there are two buildings that fascinate because theyre each others opposites.
The one is a merciless, slightly bent, 2.5 km-long line. This is the university (UNB). All
aspects of learning and research are brilliantly summed up in this seemingly endless,
prefabricated concrete serpent.
Its absolute opposite is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. A neutral, nondescript block on the
outside, its inside turns out to be a bote miracles, hollowed out as a labyrinth. A palace
of diplomacy, consisting entirely of sensations from challengingly abstract to
overpoweringly decorative. A mise-en-scne for the pure sake of effect.

Niemeyer had his ghostwriters for these kinds of stunts: the concepts and sequences of
the interior were orchestrated by ambassador Vladimir Murtinho, a born diplomat. Some
of the rooms are too beautiful for their often shady visitors; and this is all intentional.
Compared to Niemeyers, almost all other architecture seems sombre and unnecessarily
laboursome. The weather plays a part in this. Braslia is located on a savannah-like
plateau. It is an outdoor city: everything one would do indoors elsewhere can be done
outdoors in Braslia, all year long. The architecture is unencumbered by the tasks
assigned to it in the North preserving warmth or in the South cooling down. A
paper-thin membrane, a single pane of glass, suffices to mark the boundary between
indoors and outdoors.

Costas plane touched ground in the exact centre of the country. This is for political
reasons. The idea was to shift the focus from Brazils overpopulated coast to its
unexplored interior. The success of this project is shown, paradoxically, by the fact that
this most recent example of intensive master planning intended for 500,000
inhabitants is now surrounded by a shapeless blob of a city with 3.5 million inhabitants,
grown into being according to the laws of the market economy.
The exemplary airplane has become no more than a neighbourhood, embedded in a
much larger and generic city. As a result, the first impression when looking at this layout
is not its authoritarian character, but the vulnerability of modern architecture
The gargantuan political power employed to make Braslia possible has succumbed to
the even greater force of the market tsunami. The market, a growing force since the 80s,
makes quick work of fragile political statements such as Braslia. No matter how
authoritarian the old Braslia may look when seen from the sky, the market regime will
always come out on top, more authoritarian even in its randomness.

Does this matter? No. We must simply conclude that the essence of Braslia does not
consist of its architecture, but of the decision to move Brazils government inland.
Braslia is not a disappointment, but neither is it a baffling reencounter with an old,
singular ideal. Its a final spasm rather than a new dawn. A confirmation that this ideal has
lost its credibility for the time to come
The rigid organisation of the city has had unpredictable results: Braslia has become a
record-holder in insanity, divorce, and fatal traffic accidents (perfect roads, bad drivers,
no speed limit). As all diplomats were housed in one and the same apartment block,
those concrete towers became the birth ground of the punk movement in Brazil in the
80s: a high concentration of international teenagers with the right kind of music tapes.
The clear structure of the city made it relatively easy for the military junta to take over the
city in 1964: Braslia became an orthogonal panopticon a singular utopia as a
substratum for dictatorship.

Heritage
The wings of Braslias plane layout remain unfinished, but the whole project was put on
the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1987 anyway. What started fifty years ago as the
prototype of a new era has now become a relic of the past. The design is highly relevant
today, fascinating even, albeit for very different reasons: how do you preserve that which
is modern, or in other words, how do you stop modernity in its tracks?
The lobbying work for Braslias status as a World Heritage Site started immediately after
the first portion was delivered, headed by president Kubitschek himself. This makes him
a two-fold visionary: not only did he build the new capital, he also managed to have this
feat recorded for posterity by UNESCO. But how can modernity be held on to? According
to UNESCO, the fuselage and the wings of Braslias layout must be preserved forever.
The apartments are now home to the citys wealthiest inhabitants the price per square
meter is higher than anywhere else in the city, perhaps because of its World Heritage
status.
Bizarrely, the language and typology of modernism have turned out to be untenable in
the areas for which it was originally intended. In Europe, social housing blocks are being
demolished at breakneck speed yet they flourish in climates and cultures where they
dont seem to belong: Zanzibar, Singapore, Rio. The 130 blocks in Braslia have become a
refreshing collage of hardcore 60s socialism and neoliberal comfort zones. A unique
amalgam of seemingly incompatible elements.

Greek temples, three thousand neglectful years after being built, are still standing. They
are easy to preserve. A 2,000-year-old villa in Pompeii is still quite inhabitable, and a
home built by Palladio is still bursting with palpable intelligence, five centuries hence.
The Rietveld Schrder House, on the other hand, is less than a century old, yet it looks
more precarious and less alive than its much older counterparts. Modernity is
fundamentally ephemeral; it was never meant to last the ages. Modern architecture is, at
best, a minimal membrane separating part of a space in order to make it temporarily
useful for a specific purpose. The aesthetics of modernity is a constellation of nuances,
each meant to be transient.

UNESCO often threatens to strip a site of its status when it or its surroundings are
becoming too drastically or too visibly modern. Dresden lost its status because of a new
bridge that was thought to threaten the beauty of its protected riverbank landscape.
Saint Petersburg is at risk of losing it because of the construction of a Gazprom tower.
Tiring of these endless frontline battles, UNESCO is developing a new definition of the
Historic Urban Landscape: heritage is no longer considered as a single object or a single
urban ensemble, but as all natural and historical layers of a site, its empty spaces, its
infrastructure, and its social, cultural, and economic processes. Braslia might be one of
the most interesting tests for this new definition.
In CRONOCAOS [1], we concluded that the interval between now and that which has
been preserved is shrinking continuously. Shortly, heritage might even acquire a
prospective character instead of a retrospective one.
In Braslia, this is already happening. A federal ukase from 1992 demands that any
addition to the plane be designed by Niemeyer himself (at that time, 85 years old). From
this moment, Niemeyers future plans were automatically considered World Heritage.
And this might make him the biggest threat to his own posthumous reputation:
Niemeyers most recent additions are nonchalant, sometimes grim, seldom convincing,
and always situated somewhere in the wide range between the sublime and the
worthless. Just as the older De Kooning, his recent work makes one wonder whether
there still is a functioning mind guiding the masters hand, or whether the hand has taken
over.

UFO
Concluding, I have to admit I am curious about the wrong Braslia. As it turns out, this
epicentre of modernity a former minister called it the Capital in the Age of Aquarius
allows room for bureaucracy as well as the largest concentration of sects and mystics.
The largest sect, Vale Do Amanhecer, was founded by Tia Neiva, a female truck driver
who was one of the citys first pioneers. Nowhere on the planet, the sect claims, is the
Earths crust thinner and therefore the distance between the surface and the Earths
molten core shorter than here in Braslia. An excellent attraction, not only for credulous
earthlings, but also for flying saucers which, hovering over a lake, charge themselves with
the globes energy and might decide to land upon the water.
The sects headquarters looks like an ultra-serious playground, a labyrinth of slight curves
that were drawn onto the ground by the founders themselves and which doesnt differ
too much from Niemeyers recent work. At sunset, adepts in Star Trek costumes join in
the UFO ballet.
And I find myself secretly wishing I could believe in either architecture or flying saucers.

END
REM KOOLHAAS,

Dutch architect; Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate (2000); co-founder and partner of
OMA (http://oma.eu/)

NOTES:
[1] The preservation of Braslia touches upon my current interest in heritage, which,
amongst other publications, was put into words in CRONOCAOS, a heritage manifesto for
last years Biennale in Venice.
CRONOCAOS is about the astounding portion of the planet today that is, in one way or
another, subject to preservation, the safeguarding and protection of cultural and natural
heritage. According to our most scrupulous count, this concerns twelve percent of the
Earths surface today. The world has not given enough thought to this new and growing
circumstance: in the future, half the world will have to change radically in order to meet
the new demands of life on this planet, whereas the other half will be unavoidably stuck
in the past. A stagnation of which Amsterdams ring of canals is now part as well, since its
surprisingly unnoticed recognition by UNESCO.

Revista Centro/2016. Any reproduction, representation, in whole or in part, use,

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