Brazil’s airplane-shaped capital opened on 21 April 1960
Brasília, plotted on the Central-West highlands, replaced Rio de Janeiro as Brazil’s capital when President Juscelino Kubitschek inaugurated it on 21 April 1960. Lúcio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer, and Joaquim Cardozo designed the 1956 plan; Roberto Burle Marx shaped landscapes of white modernism.
The idea is old. In 1821 José Bonifácio suggested Brasília, a Latin form of Brazil, as the name of a new capital, and in 1827 he proposed building it inland, though the emperor dissolved the assembly before it could act. The 1891 republican constitution reserved 14,400 square kilometres on the central plateau for the future capital, and Belgian astronomer Luís Cruls surveyed the site in 1892 and 1894. In 1922, for the independence centenary, a foundation obelisk marked the spot. Legend adds that Saint John Bosco dreamed of such a city in 1883.
President Juscelino Kubitschek, elected in 1955, made the capital a campaign pledge. In 1957 an international jury chose the plan of Lúcio Costa, a student of Le Corbusier, even though it lacked the models and charts of rival entries. Its cross of two axes resembles an aeroplane or a dragonfly: a Monumental Axis for ministries, Congress, the presidential palace, and the supreme court, and a Residential Axis of superblocks capped at six storeys, intended to mix upper and middle classes.
The plan favoured cars, with seven traffic lanes each way on the Monumental Axis, and critics say it stretched distances for people without them. Later growth forced traffic lights onto the axis and led to a metro serving the satellite towns. The Federal District now has 35 administrative regions, and the name Brasília often stands for all of it.
The city, home to 2.8 million people, has Latin America’s highest GDP per capita among major cities. UNESCO listed it as World Heritage in 1987 and named it a City of Design in 2017, and it hosted matches at the 2014 World Cup.
Source: Brasília
