Brasilia

IN the spring of 1956, in Landscape, a magazine of human geography edited in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Senhor J. O. de Meira Penna, of the Brazilian Foreign Office, published an article entitled 'Brazil builds a new capital'. This was written at the turning point of a long series of discussions, lasting well over a century, which were only just about to become eventful. At that time nobody knew what the new city was to look like, nor even whether President Juscelino Kubitschek would be able to persuade his countrymen to turn this ancient dream into reality. Meira Penna seems to have been confident of the outcome. His study was extended to embrace the administrative history of all the more important new capital cities of the world, from Thebes and Constantinople, through St. Petersburg and Washington, to Ankara, Canberra and Brasilia. This was published as a book, in Portuguese, dur? ing 1958 with an introduction by Dr. Israel Pinheiro, President of the National Capital Development Commission that was to build Brasilia. Its title was Quando mudam as capitais (When capitals are moved). This book has now been revised, brought up to date and translated into English and at the moment is seeking a publisher in this country. From it I have derived something of the inner history of this extraordinary and controversial achievement. The pilot plan competition: 1957.?Meanwhile, I was able to collect some evidence at first hand. During March and April 1957 I was appointed to act as an adviser to Novacap (the Development Commission for the New Capital) and to sit on an international jury of three to assess, with our Brazilian colleagues, the submissions of groups of architects, engineers and others of a pilot plan for the new city. I thus had what might be described as a 'walking-on part' in the second act of this opera; and those who have walked into any kind of South American revolution, however bloodless, will know how suddenly and how dramatically one gets caught up in the action. It was so with us. Our French colleague, Andre Sive, died just over a year ago. The quiet American with a Greek name, Stamo Papadaki, and I, have survived. Speaking for myself I found this Brazilian experience one of the most stimulating of my whole life; and it remains a major interest. To anyone who is a student of the growth of towns and of man's capacity to order his own environment, Brasilia must appeal, even if in some respects the actuality disappoints: it is a phenomenon of our times. It is an act of will as formidable as that which founded the new capital of Constantinople in a.d. 330; and the vision of Brasilia goes back nearly 170 years. The plotters of what is known as the Inconfidencia of 1789, plotted to remove the then capital of from the coast to the central provinces, but in 1808 the arrival of the Portuguese court, in flight from Napoleon, created Rio de Janeiro as the capital of the 'United Kingdom of Portugal and Brazil Independence was proclaimed in 1822, under the Emperor Peter I, and it was then that Jose Bonifacio de Andrada (the Patriarch) wrote a 'Memoir on the Necessity and Means of Building a New Capital in the Interior of Brazil'. This was the first administrative plan for Brasilia. The historian Varnhagen, Viscount of Porto Seguro, followed in 1834 w*tn a srte f?r the city 'on the high plateau where the three great river basins begin?Amazon, Sao Francisco and Plata1'. The first Republican constitution, of 1889, granted a reservation of 14,400 square kilometres for the future Federal District; a commission under

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