Who designed Brasília?

Two men, two jobs

Brasília is often credited to Oscar Niemeyer alone. That is half the story. The layout of the city, its axes, its residential superblocks and the arcs everyone calls wings, is the work of Lúcio Costa. Niemeyer designed the buildings that became its postcards: the Alvorada Palace, the National Congress, the Cathedral. One drew the map; the other filled it with curves. The name of Costa’s scheme stuck, too: the city’s core is still called the Plano Piloto, the Pilot Plan.

The competition of 1957

In September 1956 the government published the rules of an open competition for the plan of the new capital. By March 1957 the entries were in: 26 of them, many with models, detailed drawings and stacks of calculations. Costa, then 55, handed in a few freehand sketches and a typed report whose first sentence is an apology. Right after it he wrote: “I did not intend to compete and, in truth, I am not competing.” He said he was only getting rid of a solution that had come to him ready-made.

The jury was chaired by Israel Pinheiro, head of Novacap, the state company building the city. It included foreigners such as the English planner William Holford, and one name from the house: Niemeyer. On March 16, 1957, it chose entry number 22, Costa’s. Some rivals complained that they had handed in far more paper. The jury explained itself.

A clear, direct and fundamentally simple plan. It has the spirit of the twentieth century: it is new; it is free and open; it is disciplined without being rigid.

It wasn’t looking for the most detailed project. Details could come later. It wanted an idea of a capital, and found only one. That idea, two axes in a cross with one bent to the land, is in Is Brasília shaped like an airplane?.

Who was Lúcio Costa?

He was born in Toulon, France, on February 27, 1902, to Brazilian parents, and led the generation that brought modern architecture to Brazil. He headed the team behind the Ministry of Education and Health building in Rio, a landmark of the movement, with Le Corbusier as consultant; the young Niemeyer was on that team. Costa also spent decades in Brazil’s historic heritage service, protecting colonial churches and mansions. The planner of the modernist capital spent his working days looking after the colonial past. He died in Rio in 1998.

And Niemeyer?

Kubitschek had known him since 1940, when, as mayor of Belo Horizonte, he hired him to design Pampulha. Niemeyer shunned the right angle: “what attracts me is the free and sensual curve,” he would write. In Brasília he was Novacap’s chief architect. He started with the president’s house: the Alvorada Palace opened in June 1958. Then came the Congress, with one dome facing up and another facing down, and the Cathedral, with sixteen curved columns opening to the sky. He won the Pritzker Prize in 1988 and died in 2012, aged 104, still working.