10/10/2019 Brasília and the Populist Frontier

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Brasília and the Populist Frontier

Photographs of the construction camps that preceded the modernist city.

DAVID NUNES SOLOMON OCTOBER 2019

Groundbreaking ceremony at the

construction site for Brazil’s new capital city,
October 1956, from Revista Brasília No. 5
(1957). [All images courtesy of Arquivo
Público do Distrito Federal]

In late 1956, president Juscelino Kubitschek attended a groundbreaking ceremony for the
new capital city he had pledged to build on Brazil’s central plateau. In photos he is
surrounded by officials, journalists, construction workers, and religious leaders on a
makeshift stage beneath a monumental cross of unfinished timber. The shape of a cross
would appear again in the 1957 sketch by Lucio Costa that became Brasília’s master plan,
with its two axes symbolically connecting the country. Famous for its boldness and
simplicity, Costa’s drawing set the tone for a project of unprecedented scale, and when
Brasília was inaugurated as the capital, just three years later, it was hailed as a transcendent
work of modernist architecture and planning. But among the visual records of Brasília’s
construction there is another cross, no less important, formed by the intersection of two
dirt roads reaching across an empty plateau. Aerial photos show Costa’s plan being realized
by workers on the Brazilian frontier. Though rarely viewed today, these images circulated
widely in the late 1950s as part of an effort to situate Brasília as the embodiment of a new
national identity. To understand how the city functions symbolically, we can look beyond its
modernist reputation to its brief but fascinating prehistory as a construction camp.

That first presidential visit was featured in the inaugural issue of Revista Brasília, a monthly
magazine that employed two full-time photographers and a staff of journalists to construct
the foundational myths on which Kubitschek staked the future of Brazil. Some 6,000 copies
of each issue were distributed to government offices, libraries, and newsstands across the
country, to rally public support for the project and justify the expense to Congress. Another
1,000 copies circulated abroad. The magazine ran for five years, and its archive is an
incredibly rich trove of early representations of Brasília. The city is seen as a place of

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opportunity and heroic enterprise: migrant workers arrive on buses, move piles of
materials, and inscribe new roads and barracks on the newly cleared land. Signs point to
unbuilt monuments. In worker settlements on the edge of the future capital, residents mix
socially across class lines, united by a frontier sense of camaraderie. The immensity of the
plateau frames a country in the process of reinventing itself.

Top: President Juscelino Kubitschek and

Lucio Costa. Bottom left: The axes of Costa’s
plan inscribed as dirt roads. Bottom right:
Map showing the central location of the new
capital. From Revista Brasília Nos. 4, 6, and 8
(1957).

The idea to build a capital city to radiate Brazilian sovereignty over the vast interior first
emerged in the late 19th century. Its eventual location, in the state of Goiás, was prophesied
by Catholic priest Joao Bosco, who dreamt of “a Promised Land, flowing with milk and
1
honey … of inconceivable richness.” After the consolidation of the Brazilian Republic,
successive heads of state returned to the project of developing the interior, usually by
promoting specific extractive or agricultural industries. Kubitschek’s plan was different, as
it relied solely on state power. Maps showed the future Federal District at the center of a
modern, networked, and unified country. Distances to major cities were marked, signifying
that the new capital (unlike coastal Rio de Janeiro) would be independent, liberated from
historical constraints, yet connected to the country’s diverse populations. Kubitschek
campaigned on a promise to produce “fifty years of development in five” through public
investments in infrastructure, and he hired the preeminent modernist designers Oscar
Niemeyer, Roberto Burle Marx, and Lucio Costa to make it real. Brasília thus initiated a
political and planning paradigm used in many postcolonial contexts, especially in African
nations as they gained independence. Between 1962 and 1975, Nigeria, Botswana, Cote
D’Ivoire, Tanzania, Zambia, and Cameroon all built new capitals in their interior. Behind
every ambitious and symbolically loaded formal master plan were the workers who brought
it to life and infused these cities with populism.

Roughly 40,000 people lived on site during the first phase of Brasília’s construction, in three
types of settlements that ringed the edge of the Pilot Plan. First, there were camps run by

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the state-backed Companhia Urbanizadora da Nova Capital, known as NOVACAP. Residency

was restricted to state employees, who were mostly middle-class engineers, architects, and
contractors, and who lived in single-story wood structures along dirt road grids. The initial
settlement, Vila Planalto, was supposed to be cleared for open space after the inauguration
of the capital city, but it still stands today. The architecture here resembles the low-rise
casas populares designed by Oscar Niemeyer and built throughout the northern
neighborhoods of the Pilot Plan, with inverted sloped roofs, large partially screened patios,
and generous front yards. As the Pilot Plan progressed, rather than build more camps,
NOVACAP housed its employees in the completed casa popular neighborhoods. Incipient
urbanism was a frequent motif in Revista Brasília. Often contrasted with photographs of the
open plain, these neighborhoods represented the emergence of a familiar domesticity in
unfamiliar territory.

Housing in Candangolandia, a self-organized

but formally sanctioned neighborhood,
similar to Núcleo Bandeirente, 1958.

Residential street in Núcleo Bandeirante,

1956

Informal settlements on the outskirts of

Núcleo Bandeirante, 1969.

Second were the camps that housed the majority of the workforce, the contract laborers.
The government owned all of the land in the Federal District, but certain areas were set
aside for the use of private companies, and the structures in these camps were built and
owned by residents. The largest settlement, Núcleo Bandeirante, was organized along three
main streets lined with buildings made of wood, corrugated metal, and whatever other
materials the residents could procure. Here the urban fabric was more organic and less
ordered than at Vila Planalto. Núcleo Bandeirante’s original name, Cidade Livre, or “free
city,” signaled the unrestricted access it provided to migrants. Anyone could move to this
boomtown and tap the resources that flowed from the federal government. Cidade Livre
quickly became the social heart of the construction camps, and luminaries like Kubitschek,
2
Costa, and Niemeyer made frequent evening visits.

As word spread, workers arrived from across Brazil, especially from the poorer northern
3
states. Dozens of small, ad-hoc communities — the third type of settlement — emerged
near construction sites, along the banks of creeks, and in cleared areas of the scrubland, to
house migrants working low-wage jobs who couldn’t afford to live in Núcleo Bandeirante.
These sites, too, were heavily documented by Revista photographers, so that the
government could showcase the economic mobility generated by the project (and quiet
critics skeptical of the expense). Nearly all of these informal camps were razed when the
construction boom was over; some were later drowned by the creation of Lake Paranoa.

Paving the plaza in front of the Congresso

Nacional, from Revista Brasília No. 39 (1960).

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The early issues of Revista Brasília reveal a mediation between primitive life on the plateau
and the technological and cultural ambitions of the future city. Hundreds of photos show
simple encampments and unfinished infrastructures covered in red dust. Yet we also see
monumental steel structures and the soon-to-be iconic motifs of Niemeyer’s cast-on-site
concrete facades. The magazine’s layouts juxtaposed images from both categories, as if to
position Brasília as the site of a spatially and temporally compressed teleology of progress.

Another constant theme in these pages is the relationship between workers and the
architectural masterpieces they were constructing, often by hand. Photos of men laying
rebar in what would become the Congressional Assembly Hall, pouring concrete on the
plaza in front of the future Palace of Justice, and laying tiles on Avenida Monumental
implied that Brasília was not a project by and for elites, but rather a collaboration across
Brazil’s stratified classes. Workers were shown as participants in a heroic national project.
Niemeyer observed that building in a remote, informal setting, with largely untrained
laborers, rather than “heavy industry with systems of prefabrication,” gave him “an almost
unlimited plastic freedom.” He described an architectural Eden, free from the limits
imposed by cities, with their industrialists and bourgeoisie, and their modern regulations
and attitudes. His pursuit of Eden’s fruits, though, depended on the backing of Brazil’s
4
bureaucracy and Kubitschek’s blank check.

President Kubitschek’s residence, Catetinho,

from Revista Brasília No. 14 (1957).

Workers’ Training School in Taguatinga, ca.

1958-60.

While Brasilia is known today for its daring and formally experimental monuments, the
design scheme also included many common buildings that were not much different from
prototypes in the camps. Brasília’s first primary school, designed by NOVACAP architects in
Candangolandia, and Kubitschek’s personal residence, Catetinho, designed by Niemeyer,
were both wood structures assembled in the rapid, provisional style common to the camps.
(Indeed, the media played up the fact that Catetinho was built in ten days, to signal
5
Kubitschek’s participation in the discomforts of frontier life.) Yet these buildings shared a
formal language with the concrete low-rise residences in the Pilot Plan, adapting modernist
tropes such as pilotis and elevated exterior walkways to provisional architecture.

Starting in the second year, the back cover of each issue of Revista Brasília featured a collage
of images from the early days of construction, layered with a line drawing by Costa or
Niemeyer. In one typical collage, a migrant worker walking on a dusty road, with a bag over
his shoulder, was superimposed on a residential superblock rising from the plateau. The
ideology that made Brasília possible — the myth of an empty landscape superseded by a
futuristic city, of humanity emerging from an uncertain and primitive existence into the
light of modernity — was constructed here.

Left: Front cover, Revista Brasília No. 29

(1958). Right: Back cover, Revista Brasília No.
25 (1958).

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The government aimed to show that Brasília was creating a new class of enterprising
workers, or modern pioneers. Early on, the national media used two terms to describe the
builders of the new capital. Bandeirante, referring to the first residents of the Federal
District (specifically NOVACAP employees), was derived from an old name for the
Portuguese colonists who explored the hinterland. Candango started out as a derogatory
word for uneducated, itinerant workers. Yet over time, as these workers were portrayed by
the government as essential to the project of Brasília, the connotations of the word became
celebratory. Candangos were symbols of upward mobility and national progress. By the end,
newspapers were using bandeirente and candango interchangeably to mean anyone living
6
in the Federal District.

Kubitschek’s frequent visits symbolized a democratic utopia where the poor worked and
lived alongside engineers, architects, and public officials. Brazilian modernity had two
dimensions: technological progress, embodied in Niemeyer’s concrete architecture and
Costa’s continuous freeways; and national solidarity, represented by the image of the heroic
construction worker. Although in reality the city was segregated by class, interviews
conducted years later revealed a nostalgia for the camaraderie of the construction years.
“There wasn’t high society,” a bricklayer observed. “Engineers lived in their own camps,
[but] what was unusual about Brasília was that you saw that the engineer had the same
7
appearance as the worker, dressed in casual pants, boots and all.” Photos of Núcleo
Bandeirante were the first images of street life in Brasília to reach a wide public. The
informal but energetic urban scenes gave visual expression to the collective excitement and
ethos of equality that Kubitschek hoped to encode in the future city.

Núcleo Bandeirante and the growing

infrastructure of Brasília, 1970.

After the capital was inaugurated, the camps disappeared from the pages of Revista Brasília,
but they were still there on the plateau. Neimeyer and Costa had envisioned that workers
would live within the Pilot Plan, so that the camps could be dismantled, but those social
ambitions were defeated. Some workers were forcibly removed when the Paranoa River
Valley was flooded to create a lake for the 140,000 inhabitants of the new capital city. Others,
including those who lived in Núcleo Bandeirante, used the solidarity they had formed
during the construction years to organize and resist eviction. Their houses stayed in place,
but they were exiled from the myth of Brasília. Construction camps that had been marketed
by the government as a prophetic city-before-the city were reframed as a blight on the
landscape — the city outside the city.

Now protected under UNESCO world heritage rules, the neighborhoods that evolved from
these construction camps are restricted to their original footprint, and historicized with
plaques, murals, and landmark designations for the original timber buildings. Peripheral to
modern Brasília, they are static fragments, engulfed in the growing highway infrastructure.
In contrast, the central neighborhoods of the Pilot Plan are always contemporary and new;
their monuments rise from the plateau as a collection of autonomous modernist objects, an
urban rupture with history. The construction workers’ neighborhoods are no more than a
few years older the central city, but they are perceived differently, because of their original
framing.

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Nevertheless, the architectural and ideological power of Brasília depends on these

construction camps. Candangos built the city and the city’s origin myth, its frontier
imaginary. This is the history that Brasília emerges from and against which it distinguishes
itself as modern.

SLIDESHOW 

SLIDESHOW Congresso Nacional, from Revista Brasília Nos. 35 (1960) and 28 (1959).

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AUTHOR’S NOTE

This research would not have been possible without the generous support of the
Haddad Foundation, through the Harvard-Brazil Cities Research Grant program of the
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David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. A version
of this article will be published later this year in Manifest No. 3.

NOTES

1. Cited in Ernesto Silva, Historia de Brasília: Um Sonho, Umea Esperaça, Uma Revalidate

(Coordenada-Editora de Brasília, 1971), 34. ↩

2. Joao Almino, i (Dalkey Archive Press, 2013). ↩

3. Edson Béu, Expresso Brasilia: a Histtória Contada Pelos Candangos (Universidade de Brasília,

2012). ↩

4. Oscar Niemeyer, “Minha Experiencia em Brasília,” Arquitetura e Engenharia, July-August 1961,

22-24. For more on the emergence of Neimeyer’s formalism in relation to the conditions of
Brazil’s construction industry, see James Holston, The Modernist City: An Anthropological

Critique of Brasília (University of Chicago Press, 1989). ↩

5. Catetinho, meaning “Small Catete Palace,” references the presidential palace in Rio de Janeiro.

↩
6. Holston, 211. ↩

7. Recorded by Lins Ribeiro, 1980, in Programa de História Oral, Brasília, Arquivo Public do Distrito
Federal, 2000. Oral histories recorded by the Federal Archive indicate an overwhelming sense of
pride on the part of the laborers in participating in a project that was at the center of the

country’s attention. ↩

 CITE
David Nunes Solomon, “Brasília and the Populist Frontier,” Places Journal, October 2019.

Accessed 10 Oct 2019. <https://placesjournal.org/article/brasilia-and-the-populist-fron-

tier/>

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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David Nunes Solomon

David Nunes Solomon is an

architectural designer, researcher,
and writer based in California and
Switzerland.

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