BREATHING NEW LIFE INTO BRASÍLIA

Brazil’s capital used to be seen as an example of what went wrong with Modernist urbanism. But 60 years after its founding, MICHAEL SNYDER finds a Brasília that is very much of, and for, the people.

- MICHAEL SNYDER

LÚCIO MONTIEL was the third child ever to be born in Brasília’s Base Hospital. It was 1960, and after four years of construction, the city had just formally opened as the centre of Brazilian bureaucracy. Montiel’s parents, like so many others from across the country, had chosen to arrive early, leaving the then-capital, Rio de Janeiro, to take part in this wildly optimistic experiment—a Modernist fantasia of a city willed into existence by the leftist president Juscelino Kubitschek, the architect Oscar Niemeyer, and the visionary city planner Lúcio Costa, the man after whom Lúcio Montiel was named.

Today, Montiel works as a guide for the city and surrounding region. He met me on a bright blue morning in February, before the pandemic had hit Brazil, at the recently opened B Hotel (doubles from ₹7,345; bhotel brasilia.com.br). Its wood-panelled interiors, designed by the São Paulo–based architect Isay Weinfield, are a nod to the slick, high-modern aesthetic of Niemeyer.

Over the course of the morning, Montiel and I visited Niemeyer’s institutional structures along the grand central esplanade, better known as the Monumental Axis: the Metropolitan Cathedral, its parabolic white columns like ascending gulls; the Itamaraty Palace, with delicate concrete arches rising from a reflecting pool studded with lily pads and papyrus plants; and the Plaza of the Three Powers, where the white marble columns of the Supreme Court and Planalto Palace seem to billow like curtains.