Brasilia comes to Chandigarh: A confluence of 20th century's two iconic urban utopias
Rajnish Wattas
In a manner of speaking, it is a homecoming for the exhibition ‘Brasília 60+ and the Construction of Modern Brazil’. On display at the Le Corbusier-designed Government Museum and Art Gallery, Chandigarh, it is a confluence of 20th century’s two iconic urban utopias based on modernist principles enunciated by Corbusier. Not only the planner of Brasilia, Lucio Costa, but also its architect, Oscar Niemeyer, had been Corbusier’s followers, with the latter having worked with him on the UN headquarters project at New York. The parallels between the two cities are immense and of critical value to architects, planners and all urbanists.
A tale of two capitals
Brasilia for the nation of Brazil and Chandigarh for the newly independent India’s state of Punjab, had similar beginnings. The audacity of the two nations in undertaking these projects with very limited resources was indeed a leap of faith.
Though Brazil had been Independent for nearly 200 years, most development and population had thus far been concentrated to coastal cities like Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. So strong was the national sentiment for a new, more centralised capital city that it was even enshrined in the Brazilian Constitution in 1891, but only commissioned when President Juscelino Kubitschek took it up in 1956, in fulfilment of his campaign pledge. An international jury selected Lucio Costa, a prominent Brazilian architect-planner and a Corbusier protégé, for the project.
His proposal reflected many shades of Corbusier’s city planning principles. Costa believed that a modern city needed to be based on a deliberate, formal order relying on rational principles — the opposite of messy, over-crowded old cities that organically sprawled over time, like Rio with its ‘favelas’, the low-income slummy settlements. In line with Corbusier’s urbanism, Costa too conceived the city in four components: the monumental; the civic architecture; the residential areas; and the bucolic for the open space. Sounds so much like Chandigarh’s four functions: living, working, circulation and care of body and spirit.
The city plan by Costa called ‘Plano Piloto’ was likened to a bird, a bow and arrow, or an airplane laid out along a monumental east-west axis, crossed by a north-south axis curved to follow the topography. It had the guiding geometry of Chandigarh’s orthogonal layout, but with much lesser rigidity. Brasilia brought together ideas of grand administrative centres and public spaces with the neighbourhood units and their corresponding Superblocks (Superquadras). A new idea of urban living in six-storey housing blocks (quadras) supported on pylons, which allowed the landscape to flow beneath and around them, was introduced.
The centralised hub for a series of key government structures, the Praça dos Três Poderes (Square of the Three Powers), is located in the middle of the monumental axis. The National Congress building facing the Executive and the Supreme Federal Court is located there. Just like Corbusier’s Capitol Complex, Brasilia’s seat of government too is at the tip of its defining axis surrounded by water bodies and detached from the residential zones.
But what really infuses life into Lucio Costa’s plan is the sculpturally evocative architecture of Oscar Niemeyer and its enigmatic landscaping by Roberto Burle Marx.
making of a city
Starting from the original empty site to becoming a monumental city, the story of Brasilia is narrated in the exhibition through exquisite black and white photographs, models, videos and informative panels. The exhibition, which will remain open till January 31, has been conceived by Ambassador Andre Aranha Correa do Lago.
From barren earth rise structures at various stages of construction, finally shaping into powerful monuments of iconic architecture. Clearly, the spotlight is on the edifices of Niemeyer’s architectural vocabulary that turn concrete into elegant floating roofs supported by delicate feather-like columns, holding them on slender wings. “Niemeyer drew his pillars as ‘feminine’ L-shaped wings, tapering at the top and bottom to give the buildings the sense that they barely touch the ground while they reach for the sky at the other end,” explains Andre.
Just as Corbusier is at his sculptural best in the ensemble of monuments of the Capitol Complex, Niemeyer too establishes occult balance and resonance in the interface between the Congress, the President’s office and the Supreme Court. Photographs taken from unusual angles capture contrasting juxtapositions, textures, counter-points of forms with a poetic play of light and shade.
Besides the ‘Square of Three Powers’ edifices, a most spectacularly aesthetic building is the Cathedral of Brasilia, with stained glass frescoes making the hyperbolic roof look like an umbrella of divinity and artistic creativity. Photographs of other components of the city, like the university, the residential blocks and the Itamaraty Palace (Foreign Ministry), are eye-catching.
In a remarkable feat of political will and engineering prowess, Brasilia was built in 41 months, from 1956 to April 21, 1960, when it was officially inaugurated. And in 1987, it was inscribed in the Unesco list of world monuments. In spite of such compelling beauty of architecture and ordered symmetry of the layout, the exhibition does not shy away from the issues and problems facing the city of Brasilia today.
Notwithstanding the critics, however, both Brasilia and Chandigarh are ideals of human endeavour. No plan is perfect and will always be a work in progress.
