Brasilia – Not Just for Politicians or Architects

By Simon Heyes

 

Ok it’s a terrible marketing strapline but in more than 10 years as a tour operator I only once sent clients to Brasilia and yes, it was an architect friend on his honeymoon. Clearly this is no Rio – no sea, no mountains, no forests – yet nonetheless it’s a fascinating, unique city, sitting proudly atop its inland plateau and worthy recipient of UNESCO World Heritage Site status.

 

 

Brazil’s political might finds focus here for good or – mostly it seems these days – for ill but curiously I don’t feel that heavy wielding of power, the city felt light. This is not architecture made to make the individual feel small and worthless but to inspire. Huge skies stretch away above wide 1950’s avenues prescient of future traffic to a far flung horizon. Away from the many malls and smart hotels like the B Hotel where i stayed – this is the Latin American city with the highest per capita GDP – I felt an architectural, sensory optimism.

 

 

Niemeyer – what a legend. Oscar Ribeiro de Almeida Niemeyer Soares Filho, of long name and long life (104 yrs), a once exiled communist and atheist who designed countless churches and mosques and finished his great work on request even after the right wing military dictatorship had taken over. Neimeyer wrote later of Brasilia “President [Juscelino] Kubitschek wanted to build a new capital. But he didn’t want to build just any old capital. He wanted to build a city that would represent Brazil.” And of its Cathedral he intended the large glass windows “to connect the people to the sky, where their Lord’s paradise is.”

 

I love his approach. “I am not attracted to straight angles or to the straight line, hard and inflexible, created by man. I am attracted to free-flowing, sensual curves. The curves that I find in the mountains of my country, in the sinuousness of its rivers, in the waves of the ocean, and on the body of the beloved woman. Curves make up the entire Universe, the curved Universe of Einstein.[4]

 

Stroll through ideas and idealism solidified but never heavy, beneath the big blue above …take a walk through the Utopian design dreams of Niemeyer (the Architect), Lucio Costa (the Urban Planner), Joaquim Cardozo (Poet and Structural engineer) and the lush landscaping of another legend Roberto Burle Marx, one of the first people to argue for protecting and valuing the Amazon.

 

 

 

Brasilia is the gateway for visiting Senderos’ partner Pousada Trijunção, a conservation project and high end wildlife safari lodge set amidst the threatened Cerrado, world’s most bio diverse savannah where Maned Wolf and jaguars roam.

 

 

 

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