Is Brasília shaped like an airplane?

The plane everyone sees

Look at Brasília on a map. A long straight line crosses a wide, shallow arc near its middle. It looks like an airplane: a fuselage, two wings, a nose pointing at the lake. People saw it early, and the nickname stuck to the neighborhoods themselves: Asa Sul and Asa Norte, the South Wing and the North Wing. Repeat a nickname long enough and it turns into a story, the story that Brazil’s new capital was designed as a plane. It wasn’t.

A cross on paper

The starting point is the report Lúcio Costa handed in to the 1957 competition for the city’s Pilot Plan, the Plano Piloto. The whole idea fits in one gesture: two axes crossing at a right angle, “the very sign of the cross,” as he wrote, the gesture of someone taking possession of a place. Only then did he bend one of the axes to follow the land and the way the water runs. That bend, drawn to fit the terrain, is what reads today as a pair of wings.

Government on the straight axis, homes on the curve

Follow the drawing. On the straight axis, the Eixo Monumental or Monumental Axis, sits the government: ministries in a row and, at the tip, the Praça dos Três Poderes, the Three Powers Square, with Congress, the president’s Planalto Palace and the Supreme Federal Court. On the curved axis live the people, in superquadras, superblocks of six-story apartment buildings raised on pilotis, columns that leave the ground floor open. Where the two axes cross stands the bus station. There are almost no street corners.

So the “fuselage” holds the state and the “wings” hold the homes. It is also why a Brasília address reads like a grid reference: South or North Wing, block number, building letter. Residents find their way by the cross, even while they call it a plane.

Costa’s butterfly

The airplane came later, from the people, and it stuck. When asked, Costa preferred another image: a butterfly. Plane or butterfly, both describe the finished shape. The beginning was a cross.

The drawing even came before the landscape that frames it today. The lake the “nose” points at, Lake Paranoá, did not exist when Costa sketched the city in 1957. It was dammed in 1959, while the buildings were already going up.

The cross came back on opening night. At the midnight Mass of April 21, 1960, the city born of a cross received another one on the altar, made of iron and brought from the cathedral of Braga, in Portugal. In 1987 UNESCO added Brasília to its World Heritage List. Who drew what, Costa the plan and Oscar Niemeyer the buildings, is in Who designed Brasília?. Why the country wanted a capital on the plateau at all is in Why did Brazil move its capital to Brasília?.