Brasilia Life Beyond Utopia

摘要

Brasilia today lies at the heart of a thriving metropolitan region, the Distrito Federal (Federal District): a region of 5,800 square kilometres (2,240 square miles) in the central plateau of Brazil, 1,000 kilometres (620 miles) inland from the former capital, Rio de Janeiro. Since its origin in the 1950s, it has proved to be a pragmatic and successful response to the challenges of urban development. Brasilia was not, in fact, planned in any meaningful way. The Brazilian architect and planner Lucio Costa's entry for the design competition for the new city in 1956 was a series of sketches of ideal urban forms of communal apartment blocks loosely based on Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse of 1935, and 'superblocks' of single-family houses based on the North American Radburn layout (1929). He subsequently elaborated these into the Piano Piloto (Pilot Plan), and added the satellite city of Taguatinga.