Unoriginal impressions of Brasilia

Thanks for liking to that, Chris. In addition to the like you quote, I really liked these: “The reality is worse than anything anyone has said about it” and “Nothing dates faster than people’s fantasies about the future”. Useful lines for many occasions.

But, I’m not always sure that “planed” spaces must be awful , even when strange and striking. 3 places I’ve spent time come to mind to me, only one of them really unpleasant: The Empire State Plaza in Albany New York, which is quite alien and not at home in the city, but striking, often functional, and enclosed enough by the city that it becomes a piece of it, as opposed to something oppressive. Next, the main campus at SUNY Albany- this is the awful one- high modern, contained, but set outside the main part of the city such that it’s almost impossible to get anywhere without driving. I found it extremely alienating, and a hard place to work. Finally, the planed city in Russia, Zelenograd (“Green city”), almost a suburb of Moscow these days because of sprawl, it was planned as a high-tech center for the Soviet Union (the silicon valley of the Soviet Union, supposedly) but, it mixed “micro-regions” of high-rise buildings with patches for forest (hence the name) that had very pleasant paths through them, and it was easy to walk to shopping areas, movies, etc. It was one of the stranger places that I had lived, but not at all alienating or inhumane, despite being essentially completely planned (by central planers, even, I suppose.)

One aspect of it was a developing country trend as also seen in e.g. Islamabad which leaving aside other issues in trying to get around the place, never envisaged a role for pedestrians. Then you’ve got the Arab mutations of this where an obsession with shapes that looked cool on a map (e.g. Kuwait City’s concentric circles) joined with the engineer’s lust for ramming an expressway through the “old” city (e.g. Cairo). Now you’ve got a region wondering why its citizens seem so alienated from its capital cities. The contrast between Istanbul and its former imperial hinterland cities in terms of being a city for people is pretty stark, and this weekend the former’s residents showed their attitude to the pave it over mentality.

Correct or not, Hughes’s tumbling sentences are always hypnotically entrancing. I believe everything he says.

I am not sold on these analyses of the failure of high modernist city planning. First, they aren’t exactly disasters comparable to forced collectivization; it’s more that they fail their utopian goals where other cities, often with much worse design or lack of it, fail to have utopian goals. In the case of Brasilia, it would be sensible to compare it with unplanned third world cities that experienced dramatic population increases: it starts to look a lot better put next to the boom towns of Amazonia and Mato Grosso, or even western Rio.

Second, you’d probably want to find a city founded in the 1950s: the critique that it is impossible to design a livable city, to predict all the organic complexities of communal life, etc… might be true, but that doesn’t mean that given enough time people won’t be able to make a living city from utopian bones. And that is what happened in Brasilia; much of the discourse about its ‘failure’ is that it evolved into something not foreseen by its designers. Sure, people have to work against the grain to do so, but that’s also the case with other cities.

On the other hand, there is a distinctive social texture to these designed cities. Brasilia and Canberra are probably awful places to visit, but they are not such bad places to live in. Public life tends to be less visible to a casual visitor – the effect is especially dramatic in Latin America, but Canberra is also notorious. I’ve driven across Canberra on a Sunday afternoon and not seen a single person, but Canberra is actually not a bad place for arts, it has a cosy literary scene, it used to have a great music scene before the ANU liquidated its music school. Brasilia was probably second only to Sao Paulo for its punk scene in 1980s. It’s like Liverpool had bad weather, Brasilia had brutalism. The very alienating nature of the architecture turns out to be like a petri dish for new social forms.

Josh G:
Le Corbusier’s legacy was truly vile. That man shouldn’t have been allowed to design anything beyond an outhouse.

I think the issues here are mainly about city planning and ambitious state-directed projects (I haven’t read ‘Seeing Like a State’, but isn’t that what Scott meant by high modernism?), not architectural style.

Canberra represents the ideal solution. Build lots of modernist/fascist/neoclassical buildings, then hide them all behind lots of trees. It works perfectly to the extent that, viewed from the right elevation, the city looks like a forested plain, dotted with occasional inhabited clearings

Tonys story could have happend to me in any city in Florida, they all look like they have no city center to the European eye.

(There’s a bit missing there: ‘by the refusal of individuals to have their history blotted out by the “progressive” and forward-looking nature of the project;’)

I wish ‘urbanism’ or a similar term was commonly used in English – l’urbanisme means so much more than ‘town planning’. But it isn’t, which gives Debord’s chapter on ‘urbanism’ in The Society of the Spectacle an unwarrantedly abstract and ‘theoretical’ air. Posts like this – and polemics like Hughes’ – are good for giving content to the U-word:

Urbanism is the modern fulfillment of the uninterrupted task which safeguards class power: the preservation of the atomization of workers who had been dangerously brought together by urban conditions of production. The constant struggle that had to be waged against every possible form of their coming together discovers its favored field in urbanism. After the experiences of the French Revolution, the efforts of all established powers to increase the means of maintaining order in the streets finally culminate in the suppression of the street.

I read those words for the first time on my first visit to Milton Keynes. I looked from the page to the landscape and the landscape back to the page…

A supercharged Canberra.

Looks as if the place might have some Ruin Value.

You know who else was concerned that his massive building projects should look good as ruins in centuries to come? (Really, he was.)

Good point from Alex at 21, which also goes to 4’s “Now you’ve got a region wondering why its citizens seem so alienated from its capital cities” – the inhabitants of Egypt aren’t alienated from Cairo to the point of not wanting to live there. Cairo’s over 9 million people. Islamabad is growing fast.

But, vaguely related: which famous Egyptian architect is this talking about?

“X was concerned about modern development and the construction of high-rise buildings in Cairo and other ancient cities in the Middle East. He believed that the large, impersonal, and often ugly apartment blocks built in the 1960s and 1970s had ruined old neighborhoods, and took away privacy and dignity from people. X’s own family moved into such an apartment block in 1990, which to him was “a shabby symbol of Egypt’s haphazard attempts to modernize and its shameless embrace of the West.” For his thesis, X focused his studies on the ancient city of Aleppo in Syria. He explored the history of Aleppo’s urban landscapes and the general themes of the conflict between Arab civilization and modernity. X criticized how the modern skyscrapers and development projects in Aleppo were disrupting the fabric of that city by blocking community streets and altering the skyline.”

#18: not sure. From experience of working with developers, I think the suppression of the street is perhaps more to do with wanting shoppers to never leave the premises. A street is shared (it’s a gap between properties); the inverse of the street is therefore the mall, where all circulation spaces are entirely within a single ownership. The removal of any space for public assembly is incidental to this commercial driver. Further, the car makes the mall possible, in that building a large mall is much more affordable at a city fringe, and cars allow people to get there. Air conditioning is another enabler.

I’d also want to stress that modernism – the style – has very little to do with the phenomena and processes which have led to what I think most contemporary designers would now call anti-urbanism: i.e. atomised, car-dependent, public space deprived patterns of development. Modernism just happened to come along at more or less the same time. If it hadn’t, you’d have gotten much the same thing, only rendered in Art Deco, or Frank Lloyd Wright-ish, or whatever. Everyone was excited by the possibilities of cars when they were new (and helicopters, even) and it makes no sense to single out Le Corbusier or Niemeyer or any modernist.

This is the +15 map of Calgary. Bridges from one building to another in the downtown core. I think Minneapolis has something similar.

Brasilia is also one of the cities examined in the documentary film, Urbanized. I spent a couple of days in the city shortly after seeing the film. I found the criticism of the place resonated with my experience visiting it.

I went from Brasilia to Quito, Ecuador. Quito seemed more functional, albeit chaotic.

@27
Toronto is well connected underground in the central city. Houston is much the same except its summer, not winter, when no one is on the street.

Cincinnati, Calgary and Minneapolis have in common extensive sky-walks that allow one to move between and among the buildings without going outside (although sometimes a quick pop out and back might save a bit of walking).

The facilitator in all of these ventures was the creation of a sprawling retail network throughout the skyway/underground such that building owners were willing to turn over the related space of their building in exchange for the rents (often a cut of the revenues generated) from the commerce. A good selection of shops in or near the building also helps maintain higher rents for general tennants too (or so I’m told).

A win-win for these downtowns and not something entirely ‘planned’ up front but rather something which emerged over time.

@27 You’re actually thinking of Montreal.

The results of urban planning can be awesome, e.g. Haussmann’s Paris and the lack thereof can be awful, e.g. London.

But modernism and urban planning have generally speaking been a toxic combination – I say that as a great admirer of modernism in other disciplines (and even with regard to architecture if we only consider private homes for rich people).

Matt @2, interestingly, when looking for more about The Shock of the New, since it was before my time, I happened to recognize Empire State Plaza in a different episode. Shortly before that part, I swear that colonnade he’s walking through reminds me of SUNY Albany, though it’s actually Fascist Italy. Definitely an interesting bit on what he calls “the architecture of state power,” and how it looks just like “the architecture of democracy.”

ajay @22

Unless I’m much mistaken, your ‘X’ is not a famous architect but rather is Mohammad Atta, a major figure among the 9/11 plotters. But the fact that he shared certain criticisms of high-modernist-urbanism (or whatever you want to call it) is only “vaguely related” (yr phrase) to anything…

“if someone *really* believed in global warming, and that GW is serious, they would eschew jet travel, a notorious source of green house gas, and give a video talk instead.”

No, this is kind of silly. There is no amount of voluntary action that will make enough of a difference. We either start to replace major infrastructure, or we don’t. Dropping the use of current infrastructure by 10% — a whopping amount for any likely summation of voluntary reductions — won’t do it.

I’ve disliked this trope from the beginning. It deflects people from what has a chance of working (political action) to guilt-inducing absorption in personal behavior that has no chance of working.

Medieval cities were planned – tanneries and shambles downstream, produce markets near the main gates, smaller markets in the centre, large-ish central space for meetings outside the main church, a clear ring road just within the walls are all common features. It’s worth paying attention to who planned them, and how, because they often created very livable areas.

Ok, I know that there is an historical context for this, but “street plan designed to confuse Catholics” sounds so surreal… like what, 3 streets named God Street at different parts of the city but they are the same for numbering?

Ok, I know that there is an historical context for this, but “street plan designed to confuse Catholics” sounds so surreal… like what, 3 streets named God Street at different parts of the city but they are the same for numbering?

That was the way it was explained to me by the nice lady at the tourist office. And I did wonder if it meant there was a Homoousion Street and a Homoiousion Street that led in completely different directions.
Or lots of mutually contradictory street signs with pictures of the Pope on them. Faced with two signs at the same junction saying “HIS HOLINESS SAYS: LEFT TURN ONLY” and “HIS HOLINESS SAYS: NO LEFT TURN”, both equally Infallible, the average Catholic might seize up and start emitting smoke from his ears, rather like one of those supercomputers that Captain Kirk used to out-think on a regular basis.

But the actual explanation is that the city was built by the Hussites, who were under threat from the Catholics at the time. The street plan was designed to be confusing to anyone attacking it, and was (ah ha ha ha) agnostic as to what faith they followed. Speaking as a lapsed Presbyterian, it certainly confused me.

Amigo, ninguém te obrigou a vir pra cá. Veio pq quis.
Se não gostou, a saída é por onde entrou.
Beijos e boa viagem!

“Well 48 hours in a place hardly gives me the right to an opinion either”

No offense, but 48 hours in a place does lead to very superficial opinions. You should have gotten out to the superblocos, the planned residential sections, and your opinion would have been different. Every capital city looks distorted if you only see the monumental spaces and the hotel district.

As for the car thing, there are plenty of busses, and the traffic circulation plan mitigates the car centric nature (inevitable in the 1950s) of the scheme.

The city did outgrow its planned population, so there are the favelas you get elsewhere in the world, but its contradictory to complain about everything in the city being planned and then to complain about the existence of favelas, which are exactly the sort of organic bottom up urbanism critics of Brasilia claim to admire, in the same post.

I think Aristotle first proposed street planning designed to thwart enemies. In the Politics (IV.-V) he argues that thew ideal state will have a grid structure of the kind Hippodamus of Miletus pioneered, but with the streets running transversely (so that any enemy who wants to get to that non-Canberra thing, the Centre of Town, will have to zig zag (with all the blind corners this implies) to get there). Looking at the street plan for Tabor, this doesn’t seem to have been their strategy (more like a mess of string).

See also The Squares of the City by John Brunner for a fictional appraisal.

53: interesting on Aristotle; those descriptions of perfect philosophical cities always remind me of the terrifying uniformity of Corbusier’s plan for Barcelona, or indeed Catalhoyuk.
Tabor is indeed a mess, but my impression was that the point was to have narrow streets that diverged from entry points, so that the attacking force would get gradually dislocated, and no right-angle turns or straight roads. It’s also got an extensive system of catacombs, enabling the defenders to follow rule one of streetfighting: avoid streets.