Brasilia's Superquadra: Prototypical Design and the Project of the City

摘要

One of the most compelling aspects of the pilot plan for Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, inaugurated 50 years ago after three years of hasty construction, is the single unified manner in which it tackled both architecture and the city. In his proposal for the Piano piloto (pilot plan), Lucio Costa (1902-98) -the winning architect of the 1957 national competition to design the new capital for Brazil - quite consciously deployed architecture and urbanism in order to define a specific idea of the urban realm. Through a text (the competition report), a few sketches, and a drawing of the plan of the city, the architect was able to clearly describe at once all that was necessary to initiate and control the development of a city that a few years later would become the administrative and symbolic capital of the country and today its sixth largest metropolitan region.