The Modernist City: An

Anthropological Criti que of

Brasilia
James Holston

Chapter 1: Introducing Brazil and Brasilia 1

Brazil is situated in one of the most unique locations in the world. To the North and the West lies
the Amazon basin hosting thick pristine rainforests which remain virtually unnavigable. To the
South are the Brazilian highlands which are also under dense forest cover. It is a narrow strip of
coastal land to the East where most of the Brazilian population lives and most economic activity
occurs. This coast has most of Brazil’s major cities such as Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paolo, and
Salvador, and was the main hub of civilization from the colonial period onwards. The interiors are
very sparsely populated (average population density being around 1 person per square
kilometer), poorly connected, and home to Brazil’s indigenous population (or what is left of it
after repeated colonial genocide).

The colonial capital of the country was Rio de Janeiro: it was the political, economic, and cultural
heart of the country. However, since the 19 th century, the idea of a new capital for an
independent Brazil lingered on with it coming up in resolutions and laws under different
administrations. Nonetheless, the idea did not come close to fruition till as late as the 1950s due
to the sheer scale of the proposed project and political inexpediency of carrying out the same.
While politicians would skirt around the topic of a new magnificent capital in the heart of Brazil,
there was simply not enough political backing to see a project of such gargantuan proportions
through.

It was in 1955 with the election of Juscelino Kubitschek that the idea of a Brasilia came to
dominate political discourse. It was a key part of his Target Program for National Development, a
developmentalist project which envisioned the state to be the vanguard towards revolutionary
social change in Brazil in order to forge a modern sovereign nation 2. Thus, he undertook the
mammoth project, situating it in the heart of the Brazilian highlands, in the dense forest.
Relocating the capital to Brasilia had a two-fold objective. First was to achieve national
integration and regional development by bringing the seat of power more proximally located to
the interiors. There was a concerted attempt to look inside, to bring regional subsistence
economies under the national fold: integration via interiorization. Second, was to stimulate
research, development, and innovation in other target projects. Kubitschek believed that the
work that would be put into creating a new capital would simultaneously spur progress in other

1
This is not the original title of Chapter 1. My notes focus specifically on certain sections which I
thought were best represented by this title.
2
One must remember the 1950s was the decade rampant decolonization, erstwhile colonies stepping
into independence to create what we call the 3 rd World. Even though Brazil had gotten freedom more
than 100 years back, it still remained underdeveloped and stratified along the lines of wealth.
spheres (such as highway development). Thus, Brasilia was to herald a new national epoch, one
where there is an inversion of the previous history of development in Brazil: not only was the
inequity between the interiors and the coast to be corrected, Brasilia’s foundation as a modern
city would then go on to become a beacon for the rest of the country to catch up.

The political vision of Kubitschek was reflected in the form of the city of Brasilia (or as it was
planned). This was not any ordinary city, it was a city which was to be an instrument for change,
a city which would be at the starting point of a transformation of Brazilian society. The planning
of the city worked under two basic premises. First, the plan for a new city can create a social
order in its image; that is, one based on values that motivate its design. Second, this image can
be a blueprint for social change in context of national development. With these two premises,
one can understand Brasilia to essentially being a utopian city: it projected certain utopian ideas
and principles, and in this projection, it tried to act as the vehicle to towards utopia itself. For
example, one of the most defining features of Brasilia are the superquadra or apartment spaces
for living which were undifferentiated according to social class. While the size of the apartment
allotted to someone depended on the size of the family, stratification along the line of wealth (a
pervasive feature of Brazilian society, especially in the more populated coastal areas) was
attempted to bed destroyed. In many ways, Brasilia was a city created by acts of negation: the
negation of the already existing, everything that would not echo the modernism that
characterized the planning of the city.

However, the actualization of Brasilia a city space produced often paradoxical outcomes: the plan
and the effective reality diverged. It is important to understand here that Brasilia was envisioned
as a break to the rest of Brazilian society however, it was flocked and filled up by people from
that very society. While Brasilia as a city attempted to completely transform the sociality of its
inhabitants, its de-historicized existence did not go all the way in transforming attitudes and
ways of living of its migrant inhabitants. On one hand, there has been a continuing rejection of
Brasilia’s attempt to defamiliarize the familiar: this new city lacked the hubbub of the Brazilian
street, a space where the commercial, residential, and social spaces intersected, where the
population mingled and lived their lives. A central feature of Brasilia was the organization of
space into distinct zones each allocated for different purposes. These zones were created as
homogenous spaces of inhabitation were different in almost every way to chaotic mess of Rio or
Sao Paolo’s cobbled streets. Thus, inhabitants of Brasilia were uprooted from their familiar
streets into an unfamiliar, almost alien city. However, on the other hand, these same inhabitants
would thoroughly enjoy the economic opportunities that the city provided, alongside its highly
planned nature meant that there was less pollution, less crowding, and most importantly, easy
access to urban amenities (which cities like Rio heavily lacked, especially for the poor).

Thus, the Brasilia that was created, fell short of the utopian vision of the masterplan. At the same
time, it is not the old Brazilian city as well. It is a city that enshrines within it a subversive
intention, which in turn has been subverted by the population living there. Following chapters
give a better idea of the reality of the city, and its relationship to its original intentions.

Chapter 2: Blueprint Utopia

Brasilia serves as the poster boy and till date, the most complete rendition of the modernist city
as suggested by the Congres Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM). That Brasilia’s
plans are derived from the CIAM proposals can be seen from its design that zoned the city into
distinct, functional, and mutually exclusive parts for the purposes of living, commerce, leisure,
traffic, and administration (the public core) as discussed in the Athens Charter of CIAM in 1941.
Brasilia is mapped on two axes that intersect each other: one that is lined with residential
apartments and the other marked as the commercial space. The public core was on one side of
the intersection and the leisure areas were surrounding the main city. Architects Lucio Costa and
Oscar Nieyemar were proteges of CIAM’s greatest mind, Le Corbusier, and they modelled Brasilia
around his ideas. In fact, Le Corbusier himself contributed to certain plans for public buildings
and worked directly with Costa and Nieyemar.

The CIAM city is envisioned as a city of salvation: salvation from the tragic denaturing of human
labour as produced in industrialized metropolises. Thus, it proposes to create a city that is not
driven by unbridled and uncoordinated (often conflicting) private interests but rather one that by
the virtue of its form, forges a collective and optimizes its collective functionality. While
industrialization had led to massive economic and technological developments, the true
potential of the industrialized world order was hampered in the proliferation of private interests.
Thus, for the likes of Costa and Le Corbusier, industrialization had come at the cost of the
complete desecration of the social fabric of cities. The modernist project was to fix this by
asserting collective rights and a machinist city, in stark contradiction to the squalor of the
industrialized world. To better understand this perspective, one can in greater detail analyze the
premises on which it is based.

First, that there had been a major failure in the planning of cities to suit purposes of the modern
world. Cities that existed prior to industrial capitalism did not fundamentally change character to
suit the developments of the same. Second, it was the pre-eminence of private property and
private interest that hampered the planning of modern cities. Private ownership did not just
shape most buildings of the city (in terms of land use- private ownership means that no one but
the individual has a say in terms of what is to be done), it even hampered public spaces by
preventing their expansion. Thus, cities had become incapable of withstanding the continuous
growth in size and population that was seen in the 19 th and 20th centuries without damaging its
functionality, health, and social fabric. 19th century cities were thus rife with crime, destitution,
and disease. Amidst the beautiful neo-classical architecture that covered the skyline of many
western cities, there was immense disrepair, almost to anarchic proportions.

At the very center of CIAM’s project is to reconcile ‘wanton’ private interest with a focus on the
collective social good via extensive centralized planning. While one should not confuse CIAM to
be some true communist warriors who wanted to abolish private property, their perspective was
towards the redefinition in so much as the state has the ability to plan the urban space without
having to be at conflict with the owners of private land. Thus, unlike the capitalist system which
views land as disposable real estate, CIAM considers land as inalienable state patrimony. The
mobilization of land was among the first objectives of CIAM and in the case of Brasilia, it was
through a number of laws and regulations passed that land was freed up before the planning of
the city could be executed.

The ultimate goal to be achieved by the modernist city was one of egalitarianism: CIAM planners
posited that through extensive planning, zoning, and homogenization of space in the city, it could
be created such that it does is not stratified both socially and spatially into money classes.
Crucially, unlike most cities in the industrialized world which were conceived as an organism with
functional parts, CIAM’s perspective towards the city was one of a machine, a machine for living
in. In this organization, the city would be broken down into its essential functions. These would
be Taylorized, standardized, rationalized, and assembled as a totality. Thus, the totalizing scope
of modernist planning derives from its conception of the city as a machine. The architect does
not design individual objects but rather envisions interrelationships between every construction
and hence views the city in a totality. Further, reflecting the machinist perspective architects
developed a set of equally revolutionary building types and urban structures. They were
motivated by the central idea in architectural modernism that the creation of new forms of social
experience would transform society, and they viewed architectural innovation as precisely the
opportunity to do this.

The metaphor used by the planners was that architecture could be the social condenser and the
social conductor: just like an electrical condenser transforms the electrical current, architecture
as a social condenser would transform human nature itself, turning the bourgeois individualist
and denatured labourer of the capitalist society into fully developed members of a socialist
collective. Largely, this would be done via techniques of shock: exposing people to the unfamiliar
to make them question the familiar and its seeming immanence. These techniques included
inversion, arbitrary juxtaposition, montage, decontextualization, decomposition, and de-
construction. By making the modernist city ‘strange’ it sought to negate previous expectations of
urban life and hence impose a new urban order.

Chapter 3: The Plan’s Hidden Agenda

In this chapter Holston challenges the Master Plan of Brasilia. Rather than justify the city's design
as a means to radical social transformation, the plan presented the founding of the city as if it had
no history, as if it were not a response either to socioeconomic conditions in Brazil in 1957 or to
modernism in architecture. Rather, it de-historicized its idea of Brasilia, hiding its agenda for
social change in a mythology of universalizing design principles, ancient cities, and sacred
planning techniques.

He analyzes the Master Plan in detail and shows that it is more than just a city blueprint. Rather,
it is a foundation charter, an account of primordial origins with the status of law which establishes
precedents for all subsequent development in Brasilia. Moreover, it presents the architects' stated
point of view. Furthermore, as a foundation charter, it is a masterwork of narrative construction in
its own right. It is one of this century's most influential documents of city planning, especially in
developing countries, and as such deserves careful consideration.

The linking of a plan for urban design with a program for social change is a fundamental
feature of master planning in modern architecture. In general, this link is forged in two ways.
First, the architecture of the plan consciously embodies new and desired forms of social life.
Second, the modernist link between architecture and society is conceived instrumentally.
Modernists propose that people inhabiting their architecture will be forced to adopt the new forms
of collective association and personal habit the architecture represents. In this way, architecture is
considered an instrument not only of social change, but also of good government, rational order,
and the renovation of life through art. In these respects, the Master Plan of Brasilia presents a
paradox as a plan for a modernist city. Its program for social change and management
constitutes a hidden agenda: while the plan suggests some of its aspects, its basic assumptions
remain unstated. Neither its instrumentality nor its socioeconomic organization is discussed.
Moreover, the plan offers no justification for why the new federal capital should have an
architecture radically different from other Brazilian cities. Nor does it outline either the intentions
or anticipated effects of building such a city in Brazil. Furthermore, the plan lacks any explicit
description of the intended social structure of Brasilia.

Costa was the architect of the plan. His plan presented only the idea of the capital city and was
very sketchy. He does not justify the Master Plan as the outcome of a consideration of either
historical condition in Brazil or a history of ideas in architecture. Rather, he de-historicizes it by
presenting it in the terms of a foundation myth, divinely inspired. Foundation myths provide
precedents for the orders of lived experience. They justify why things are the way they are from
the teller's perspective who brings these things into being and gives them their defining attributes.
Costa asserted that the idea of the plan had a "spontaneous origin." Unpremeditated, unstudied,
and self-generating, it is in this sense presented as if without human labor and therefore without
historical origin or influence. Rather, Costa's self-effacement as creator of the plan appeared to
let the "idea" speak for itself. Costa suggested that the plan has its own inherent logic.

Costa eliminated the history of Brazil and of modern architecture from the idea of the plan
only to reinvest it with a mythology of ancient cities and their sacred planning techniques.
His plan consisted of three essential structural elements: the crossing of two axes, two terraced
embankments, and a platform. Of the three, the crossing of the axes is the most important. As it
defines the area of the city and organizes the other components, it may be considered the generator
of the plan. To de-historicize the origins of the city, he employed three simple rhetorical devices:
the plan's generation is naturalized, universalized and idealized which imparted a sense of an
organic, logical, eternally valid, ideal, and mythical origin for Brasilia. Costa managed to give
technical planning devices the aura of sacred symbols, and to invest Brasilia with a world
mythology of cities and civilizations.

However, Costa's intentions for social change are concealed in its specific proposals. For
instance, in the plan, Costa proposes his solution, the superquadra ('superblock'), without
mentioning that it derives in form and function directly from numerous experiments with
collective housing in the history of modern architecture. He did not mention that it carries with it a
related set of social objectives for the transformation of social life.

Brasilia’s plan explicated a modernist idea which inverted the usual notions of social
development. It sought to create a new society on the basis of the values that motivated its
design. It regarded that the lowest echelon employees of the government residing in Brasilia ought
to have the same rights to the city as the highest officials. Both were entitled in the plan to
apartments and living conditions of similar type. This standardization of residential organization
was an attempt to transform Brazilian society through architectural design and urban planning.

There is a second sense in which the architects' intentions for Brasilia can be interpreted as a
project for inverting the process of development. In the 1950s and 1960s most theories of
modernization assumed that developing countries would follow the course taken by the economic,
political, and social systems of Western Europe and the United States. However, the modernists
were directly influenced by Lenin's theory of revolutionary change. The modernist city was to
be based on a heavy involvement of the authority of the governments of the third-world
countries in imposing policies. The construction of new cities, especially capitals, would
stimulate technology, establish networks of communications, integrate vast and backward
regions of untapped resources, and organize social relations collectively to maximize the
potential benefits of the machine. In portraying this imagined and desired future, Brasillia
represented a critique of existing conditions, of what was inadequate and unrealized in Brazil.
Brasilia was thus proposed as both a rational and a critical utopia. It was a rational utopia as a
means and a process of development. It was also a critical utopia as an image of a future radically
different from the present. Thus, Brasilia's planners called it "the capital of the twenty-first
century" not because they thought its design futuristic in any phantasmagoric sense. Rather, it
represented for them a set of solutions to immediate development objectives that constituted
a blueprint of how to get to a possible future.

Brasilia's exemplary innovations are intended to inspire a new beginning for the nation. It was
imposed as a revolutionary invention upon the old realm rather than as built following the old
order of things. The principle of an inverted reflection of order and innovation also characterized
Brasilia's status as a modernist capital city for Costa. It is through this idea of the national capital
as exemplary city that Brasilia's agenda of social change is conceptually projected to regional
capitals and to the country as a whole.

Chapter 4: The Death of the Street 3

As previously mentioned, the discovery that Brasilia is a city without street corners produces a
profound disorientation. At the very least, the realization that utopia lacks intersections means
that both pedestrian and driver must learn to re-negotiate urban locomotion. However, this has
a more profound effect on pedestrians as crossing the street becomes more dangerous. Thus, in
many ways, the design of Brasilia completely eliminates the pedestrian in favour of the
automobile: anyone who can, drives in the high speed roads of the city. Thus, modernist
architecture attacks the street with its continuous façade of houses and shops for a variety of
reasons. First, corridor streets are seen as cesspools of disease. Second, they are not optimum
for automobiles. However, third, and most profound reason is that the street is a perfect
intersection of public and private space, an intersection which further sharpens the boundaries
between the two. This is a distinction that as we have already seen, modernism seeks to
overturn.

For Brazilians accustomed to the narrow, jostling streets of their cities, it is the presence of these
streets and the surrounding hubbub that defines a city, distinguishes it from rural life. Brasilia
has transport corridors but no streets. Buildings are planned to be at a good distance from each
other, zoning leads to homogenous areas not particularly conducive to intermingling of the
population, and most importantly, there are no street corners which act as the focal point of
human activity. In fact, given the lack of sociality that the space of Brasilia produces, many call it
an ‘urban village’.

But why are streets a defining feature of urban architecture and social life? Looking at streets
from other Brazilian cities gives us an idea. The most important feature of a city street is the
continuous façade where buildings are attached to each other. This leads to a sort of
compactness that is very conducive to the flourishing sociality. Further, streets are at the perfect
intersection of almost all aspects of urban life: they provide passage for commuting, they provide
shops and stores where commerce thrives, they can house eateries and other places of leisure,
and finally, most streets in Europe have some sort of residential dwelling, especially in the higher
floors. A street is where the city converges, where city life is lived. Lastly, streets are what give a
form to the city: the city is mapped around its streets.

3
I would suggest reading this chapter as it is packed with information that is hard to condense. If
not, at least read pages 136-144 as later mentioned.
The principal convention ordering the street in both perceptual experience and architectural
composition is the organization of its solids and voids into figure and ground relations. We
perceive the city street as both a void and a volume of space contained by surrounding solids. As
a void, it reveals these solids; as a volume it takes the shape of its container. The street thus
constitutes a special kind of empty space; it is a void that has a defined shape, usually a
rectangular volume. Seen from this angle, streets can be essentially understood as large rooms
with the exterior façade of buildings being the interior wall of the street.

Basic to modernism's doctrine of salvation is the elimination of the figural street. This it
condemns as the bastion of a corrupt civic order of stagnant public and private values, imposed
on the city through an architecture of antiquarian monuments, chaotic streets, decadent
ornament, and unsanitary dwellings. Modern architecture eliminates the corridor street by
inverting the baroque planning convention of figure and ground and by rupturing its discourse of
reversals. In the modernist city, vast areas of continuous space vast areas of continuous space
without exception form the perceptual ground against which the solids of buildings emerge as
sculptural figures. There is no relief from this absolute division of architectural labour: space is
always treated as continuous and never as figural; buildings always as sculptural and never as
back- ground. In the modernist inversion of the figure-ground convention:

solid = figure (never ground)

void = ground (never figure)

This has far-reaching implications. On the one hand, the broad avenues of the new city are
unsubordinated to any other spatial or volumetric entity. Without architectural containment and
without visible destination, they rush past the monumental buildings they isolate in space. On the
other hand, as isolated sculpture, every building now vies to be recognized as a monument. Each
competes for attention, each immortalizes its creator, and each celebrates the "beauty of the
speedway" leading people and machines to apparently limitless horizons.

Transforming Civic Discourses (pls read pages 136-144… dw there are lots of
pictures!)

Chapter 5: Typologies of Order, Work, and Residence

In this chapter, Holston evaluates the proposals to structure Brasilia in terms of the modernist
functions of work and residence. These proposals are three: (1) to organize the city into
exclusive and homogeneous zones of activity based on a predetermined typology of urban
functions and building forms; (2) to concentrate the function of work in relation to dispersed
dormitory settlements; and (3) to institute a new type of residential architecture and
organization based on the concept of the superquadra.

Zoning is the correlation, or typologizing, of social activities, building forms, and planning
conventions. Modernist architecture redefined each of these elements and developed their
classification as an instrument both of social transformation and of the rational organization of
daily life transformed. It classifies urban social activities into the four functions of housing, work,
recreation, and traffic, at times adding a fifth function termed the public core of administrative
and civic affairs. Correlated with this typology of urban social life is a classification of building
types and spatial conventions, a correlation motivated by the idea that a new physical environment
will create new types of association and habit. Thus, the typologies of modernist master planning
are totalizing in the sense that the new architecture always refers to some aspect of the new society
and the distribution of social and architectural typologies are subsumed into a single urban form.
The purpose of a master plan is therefore to achieve a rationally structured homology between
social-functional and architectural-formal organizations.

Correlation that modernism makes between form and function is most fundamentally based
on equivalence rather than difference. The formal equivalence of all the buildings in the various
sectors implies an equivalence among their functions as well. It is the merging, the
homogenization, and not the differentiation, of function that residents experience in the city's
architecture. However, this formal and functional equivalence reveals a number of basic
contradictions both in the planners' intentions and in the means by which they sought to realize
them. It remains an illusion created on paper in which different sectors are drawn in different
colors and labeled "residence," "work," "recreation," and so on. In terms of the most basic object-
space relations, there is in fact nothing different in the treatment of these sectors.

The organization of work in Brasilia in terms of the modernist paradigm of urban settlements
leads to: (1) a nearly total dependence of the local economy on the modes of organization of the
bureaucratic state; (2) a concentration and centralization of jobs in relation to dispersed
dormitory settlements; (3) a use of urban space based primarily on the commuter shuttle
between work and dormitory areas; (4) an exorbitantly expensive commuter transport system;
(5) a centrifugal pattern of class segmentation following work-dormitory commuter lines and
(6) a city center segregated by income class that for anything but work or consumer activities is
empty. What was missing was the outdoor public life of the city.

At the heart of this criticism of modern architecture is the perception that it is fundamentally
anti-individualistic. The uniform buildings do not express, simply, that people strive to develop
individuating characteristics and that they like to display their differences. It is not only that the
architecture is monotonous, but basically it denies the individuality of residents. They feel
that the architectural uniformity represses their personality in favor of the totality. It is, therefore,
perceived as fundamentally against people's right to be different, to evolve, to innovate.

Brasilia's modernist design achieved a de-familiarization of public and private values in

both the civic and the residential realms. On the one hand, it restructured the public life of the
city by eliminating the street. On the other, it restructures the residential by reducing the social
spaces of the private apartment in favor of a new type of residential collectivity in which the role
of the individual is symbolically minimized.

Chapter 7: Citi es of Rebellion

The rebellion of the pioneers forced the state to recognize their rights to the city. There came
a defiant phase when voluntary associations emerged among pioneers to create an illegal
periphery of squatter settlements and then the government organized this illegal periphery into
authorized satellite cities. This had two paradoxical consequences: on the one hand, once the
rebellious associations attained their objective of legal residence, they dissolved, forfeiting the
political organization they had achieved. On the other, in organizing the satellite cities, the
government applied principles of stratification that set off new cycles of rebellion and legitimation
that continue to this day.

Squatters formed into voluntary associations that had the primary function of representing their
members in disputes with the government. These disputes focused on (a) demands for the rights
of permanent settlement (b) demands for urban services such as potable water, sewers,
paving, and electricity; and (c) the defense of illegal settlements against eradication by
government security forces. In these disputes, the associations functioned as representative
groups engaged in political action. They transformed their members' actions from mere individual
violations of law into a collective challenge to the government's organization of Brasilia.

They subversively used state symbols against state authorities. The patronage system also
linked squatter settlements and political parties. There was also a use of both place of birth and
place of residence among migrants to form a web of patron-client relations with government
officials.

Holston distinguishes two types of formations in the development of Brasilia's periphery: the
usurpative and the derivative. The satellites represent a derivative formation in the sense that the
government created them either by executive order or by legislative act. However, in authorizing
their creation, the government was in each case giving legal foundation to what had in fact already
been usurped: the initially denied residential rights that pioneers appropriated by forming squatter
settlements. Thus, Brasilia's legal periphery has a subversive origin in land seizures. These
rebellions culminated in a recurrent pattern of urban development: those who lacked the rights to
settle organized to usurp them, mobilizing around demands for legal residence in urban not
rural communities. These actions created an illegal periphery of squatter settlements. Confronted
with this unplanned and uncontrolled development, the government responded by founding legally
constituted satellite cities of its own design to which it removed the squatters.

The rebellion of the pioneers did effect a transformation in the structure of Brasilia's public
domain, for it ensured the inclusion of social strata previously excluded. The significance of
the government's initiative is revealed in the alternatives it denied. It did not attempt a military
solution. However, the government had little choice but to use the mechanisms of social
stratification and repression that are constitutive of the very phenomena they sought to exorcise.
They denied the satellite cities political representation in order to eliminate the turbulence of
political organization. The combination of political subordination and preferential recruitment
defined the satellite cities as a differentially incorporated category of settlements within the
administrative structure of the city.