Brazil on the Move

The Madmen of the Planalto

“Mad,” growled Israél Pinheiro affectionately, when I first asked him about his friend the roadbuilder. We were at the Santos Dumont Airport in Rio in the pearly dawn of an August Sunday in 1958, waiting to take off for Brasília. “Of course he’s a little mad.”

Dr. Israél, as everybody calls him, is a rangy grayhaired quizzical man with a long rough-hewn countenance and a determined jaw under a clipped gray mustache. His tart manner tends to be mellowed by the play of expression on his face and by his sudden way of showing his long teeth in a dour smile to emphasize a joke. “… And so am I,” he added, “and so’s Kubitschek.” He grinned. “That’s why we get along so well. It takes madmen to put through a project like Brasília.”

We climb aboard and the Beechcraft roars into the air and circles over the city’s closepacked apartment buildings, which overtop dense parks and gardens tufted with royal palms and the bay, duncolored this morning and full of shipping; all enclosed in Rio’s fantastic frame of conical mountains and foaming white beaches. Above the abrupt crenelated mountain range which seems to be forever pressing the teeming city back into the ocean, the pilot sets his course into the northwest.

After the throngs and the jangling traffic and the brawling voices of loudspeakers and the dense humidity of the seaport it’s a delight to breathe the cool sharp air at six thousand feet. The checkerboard below is the resort city of Petrópolis, where the betteroff people of Rio spend their weekends among upland breezes. Beyond appears the deep gorge of the Paraíba, a river laced with rapids. There are textile factories set in crisscross patches of industrial towns on the plains beyond the mountains. Volta Redonda, where the steel mills are, is lost under the clouds to the left. To the right I catch a glimpse of Juíz de Fora, a textile town I spent a night in years ago. More mills, railroad yards … The plane bores into a high overcast.

At the end of an hour the Beechcraft is out in the sunshine again, flying over an enormous empty landscape. Small muddy watercourses wind between eroded hills. No, the green patches are not pasture, Dr. Israél explains, it’s a wild grass with little nutriment. He’s a stockman as well as a builder of cities. “Further west the grass is better.” The brightgreen oblongs now are sugarcane. “See: not a house, plenty of room for development,” he shouts with a creaky laugh.

“President Kubitschek says there’s half an inhabitant to the square kilometer. I can’t even see half an inhabitant.” “Wait till we finish Brasília,” Dr. Israél leans back in his seat to talk into my ear. “Every half will turn into ten.”

He pours a stack of glossy promotional literature into my lap: Brazil’s new capital in four languages.

Since the beginning of its existence as a separate nation, Brazil has been in search of a capital. The forerunners of independence in the late seventeen hundreds dreamed already of a federal city in the interior. At the convention which confirmed the setting up of a constitutional monarchy in 1823 Brasília was suggested as a name for the future capital. In 1891 the convention which established the charter for a federal republic on the model of the United States of the North set aside an area of four hundred and forty square leagues on the high plateau far west of the sweltering coastal lowlands as the eventual governing center of the Brazilian union. The constitution of 1946 laid down the manner in which the transfer of the capital should be carried out. When Juscelino Kubitschek was elected President ten years later he determined to make that long projected capital a reality.

Kubitschek was the son of a middle-European immigrant and a Brazilian mother. Like Dr. Israél he came from Minas Gerais. He was born in the secluded little city of Diamantina, which generations before had been the center of a great diamond industry. During Kubitschek’s boyhood years the place was a remote and forgotten settlement shrunken into a straggle of rambling old colonial buildings amid the scorched hills. Young Juscelino had no money behind him. A hardworking eager young man, he managed to get himself into the medical school in Belo Horizonte, the new capital of his state.

Belo Horizonte (Beautiful Horizon) — the Brazilians are fond of rhetorical names — was the first important Brazilian city to be built right off the drafting board. The people of Minas Gerais, Mineiros they call themselves, decided in the early nineteen hundreds that they needed a new state capital. Their old capital, Ouro Prêto (Black Gold) was, like Diamantina, an ancient colonial burgh where old families vegetated amid the superannuated splendors of convents and palaces and churches built in the days when the exploitation of great deposits of gold and precious stones brought wealth into these torrid uplands. All that was in the past. Now the raising of zebu cattle and corn and sugar cane and upland rice; manufacturing and the iron mountain at Itabira offered prospects of a new prosperity. Instead of gold and diamonds the Mineiros were beginning to dream of virgin lands to the westward.

The “beautiful horizon” the new state capital looked out on was the Brazilian west: the fertile river valleys running north into the Amazon and south into the Paraná and Paraguay rivers and the high plateau of Goiás and the wilderness of Mato Grosso.

The founding of Belo Horizonte was greeted by howls of derision from the rest of the country. Can’t be done, the wiseacres said; you can’t take a city off a drafting board and bring it to life. The wiseacres were wrong; the venture was successful. It was during Kubitschek’s student days that the city really began to take hold. Industries sprang up, the population grew. Already in 1958 Belo Horizonte had more than half a million inhabitants, bristled with skyscrapers and shining white apartmentbuildings, and was considered the pleasantest city in Brazil to live in.

So the idea that a city could be invented on the drafting board was nothing new to Dr. Kubitschek. After some studies in Paris and a successful career as one of Belo Horizonte’s leading urologists he was appointed mayor by Getúlio Vargas. From mayor of the state capital it was an easy step to governor of the state.

The Mineiros man one of Brazil’s smoothest political machines. They are a stubborn and clannish people with a sharp eye for the main chance; a man has to fight hard for a living among those scraggly hills. In the period of confusion and recrimination that followed Getúlio Vargas’s melodramatic suicide the Socialist Democratic party of Minas brought forth Dr. Kubitschek as their candidate for the presidency of Brazil. He was a new man, a progressive technician with his face towards the west, a doctor of medicine who was free from political entanglements. He was elected by an honest majority: Brasília was one of the planks in his platform.

“We have seen the success of our own new capital,” said Kubitschek and his friends. “Here’s our chance to build a federal capital that will unite the whole nation.”

People had made a lot of money out of the rise in real estate values in Belo Horizonte. The knowledge that their whole state lay athwart the lines of communication between Brasília and the sea heightened the enthusiasm of the leading Mineiros for the project. Kubitschek became their man with a mission. He would go down in history as the President who finally achieved the century old ambition for a new capital.

Two years before Kubitschek’s inauguration as President the Brazilian Congress had appointed a commission to choose the best site in the federal rectangle. This commission contracted with the firm of Donald J. Belcher & Associates of Ithaca, N.Y., for a survey. A group of American engineers and geologists, most of them from Cornell, recommended five possible locations that offered the climate, the water supply, the drainage, the subsoil necessary for the foundation of a large city. The Brazilian commission chose the present site of Brasília as the best.

When the problem of city planning and architecture arose President Kubitschek could think only of Niemeyer. His name has been associated with Kubitschek’s for years. It was Oscar Niemeyer’s design for the resort suburb of Pampulha, which Kubitschek promoted while he was mayor of Belo Horizonte, that made him the best known of the young Brazilian architects.

The novel style of these buildings raised a storm. Kubitschek stood by his architect and stubbornly invited him to design a municipal theater. Even the fact that Niemeyer calls himself a Communist while Kubitschek usually defends private enterprise did not interfere with their collaboration. When the President offered Niemeyer the post of Supervisor of Construction at Brasília at a salary which amounted to only a few hundred dollars a month, Niemeyer is said to have turned down wellpaying contracts with private interests to take the job. “Niemeyer,” Brazilians will tell you, “is the soul of Kubitschek.”

Brazilian politicians are notoriously easy of access. In those days it wasn’t too hard for an American to get an interview with President Kubitschek, particularly if the American were a journalist and the subject was Brasília.

I was taken to see him at eight o’clock in the morning at the Larangeiras Palace in Rio. It was raining hard out of a sagging gray sky; chilly; Rio was having one of its rare touches of winter. This palace which Kubitschek chose for his official residence was built early in the century by a family that owned docks in Santos during the great coffee boom. Parisian architects and decorators decked it out with all the pomp they could dream up as a background for the patriarchal Brazilian capitalism of that day. There were marble columns and salmoncolored hangings. Gilt cupids crawled around the edges of the mirrors. There were massive overmantles, plush sofas, and oriental rugs. A gilded grand piano stood out on the parquet floor under an enormous chandelier. The gray light streaky with rain poured through the tall windows, glittered in the crystals, and made the huge drawingroom seem unbelievably empty.

When President Kubitschek came walking with a short springy stride, keeping step with his chief of protocol, he looked almost as out of place as his visitors amid these Frenchified splendors. There was a certain small town look about the way he wore his clothes which was not unattractive to an American. He held himself well. He was taller than I had expected, a sallow man with large prominent eyes. Even before we sat down on the sofa he came right to the point.

“You are going to Brasília?” He pronounced the name with a special sort of fervor. He started right away to explain that Brasília was not a luxury; it was a necessity. If Brazil were to go on progressing at the rate it had been progressing during the past ten years the center of population must move westward and northward; the nation needed a crossroads.

The President talked clearly and ardently. Occasionally he stopped to allow the friend who had accompanied me to translate a difficult phrase into English. As he talked he sketched out a map of Brazil so clearly I could almost see it on the wall behind the gilded piano. Sixtyfive million people. Twenty states and four territories. Roughly half the land area of South America and most of it empty. He described how the riversystems of the Amazon basin bound Brazil on the north, more fresh water pouring out through equatorial rainforests than in all the other rivers of the world put together, thousands of kilometers navigable by ocean steamers. Still the only practical communication between Belém, the old Portuguese city which was the port of entry of the Amazon region, and the rest of the country was by air.

“The construction of Brasília is already forcing us to build roads,” he said. Communication with São Paulo and the south was already open. The highway from Rio was just about finished. The Belém-Brasília road now under construction was being built through regions that weren’t even mapped. Already they were cutting through forests of trees forty meters high. His gesture gave an inkling of the slow fall of an enormous tree. I explained I had met Sayão ten years before. He nodded enthusiastically.

Subsidiary roads, he went on, would link that highway with the Atlantic coast. With his hand he indicated the eastward bulge towards Africa. With his forefinger he drew a line along the string of isolated coastal cities running southeast from Natal and Fortaleza to Bahia and Rio and São Paulo and down into the temperate regions of Rio Grande do Sul that border on Uruguay and the Argentine.

Along the coast, he explained, the country averaged twenty-five inhabitants to the square kilometer. Brazil, socially and economically, was still only a long narrow seaside strip like Chile. “Inland we only have half an inhabitant,” he said with a wry smile.

He turned to look me full in the face. “During your pioneer days,” he said, “you North Americans always had the Pacific Ocean for a goal to lure you on across the mountains. That’s why you populated your part of the continent so quickly. Our way west has been barred by impenetrable forests and by the Andes. Brasília will constitute a goal, a place to head for on the high plateau. Building Brasília means roads. A movement of population into the fine farmlands of the interior is already going on. As soon as I was inaugurated President, I gave the word to start construction. The Brazilian people demand a new capital. Brasília is the great goal of my administration.”

The President was dropping into a political oration. I could half imagine the crowded hall, the wardheelers leading the applause of the crowd, the flash of the cameras, the busy pencils of the notetaking journalists.

He caught himself suddenly and asked for comprehension by a broad deprecatory sweep of his hands. There was a pause. The director of protocol cleared his throat. It was time to leave. We rose for the formalities of leavetaking.

Dr. Israél filled in the rest of the story. Construction started in the spring of 1956, when the President appointed him head of Novacap, the government corporation more or less modeled on TVA which was set up by Congress to put through the work.

Dr. Israél, so his secretary told me on the side, was chosen because he had made a conspicuous success of the management of the Rio Doce Railroad after its purchase from the British during the war. Dr. Israél came of a prominent and popular family in the northwest of Minas. His father had served as state governor. A graduate of the School of Mines at Ouro Prêto, Dr. Israél was associated with Kubitschek’s projects in Belo Horizonte. As a public speaker he was famous for his amusing stories. Now in the summer of 1958 he was spending alternate weeks in his Rio office and at construction headquarters on the planalto.

So, this cloudy August morning, it is the Novacap Beechcraft which is speeding my wife and me and Dr. Israél and his wife, Dona Cora, on an excursion to visit the construction work on the new capital.

Political Fences

Already we are beyond Belo Horizonte. Some time ago the copilot pointed out a light smudge of smoke blurring the city’s clustered buildings on the northern horizon. Now Dr. Israél turns towards me and jabs at the window between us with a long forefinger. “The road, the road,” he shouts above the rumble of the twin motors. Sure enough a red gash cuts across the landscape from horizon to horizon. What look like tiny white caterpillars are finished concrete bridges. “The highroad from Belo Horizonte to Brasília,” he shouts exultantly. “Brasília’s lifeline.”

The plane drones on across higher drier hills where trails are faint and few. The rivers are clear green now, the sky clear blue above ranks of cottony clouds. The earth is very red, vaguely stained with verdigris where water flows.

The plane starts to bank. On the spinning tippedup landscape a few vague squares appear, streets, tileroofed houses, fenced fields. Buzzards cruise above. This is the town of João Pinheiro, named after Dr. Israél’s father. The pilot circles over what looks like a plowed field. When he lands the strip turns out just as bumpy as it looked from the air.

Groups of swarthy countrymen come forward to greet Dr. Israél, backcountry politicos, candongos, young engineers in white shirts and khaki pants. They have a scorched look from the dry upland sun. Their faces wear easy smiles. Their voices are lowpitched and cordial. They shake hands a little shyly. We all file out through a stile in a thorny redflowering hedge that keeps the cattle off the airstrip.

Dr. Israél takes charge. He packs us into jeeps and pickup trucks that string out into a procession along the new highway. Not surfaced yet. You can hardly see it for the driving red dust as we drive over mile after mile. The road lacks bridges; but already a determined motorist, so I’m told, can make his way in good weather from Belo Horizonte to Brasília. “A road means life,” Dr. Israél cries out.

We are ushered into a neat building at the edge of a dry gulch which the highway engineers have built themselves for a messhall. Tiny glasses of cachaça are brought out on trays. Congratulations are in order. Felicidades. Toasts. Dr. Israél makes a short speech.

Down in the gully below the messhall, plank tables have been laid out under a piece of aluminum roofing set on tall poles to let the breeze blow through. It’s a churrasco, a barbeque; in Maryland we’d call it a bull roast. There’s a smell of frizzling meat. Along a shallow trench full of smoldering hardwood, chunks of beef broil on long iron spikes. At the end a suckling pig on a spit revolves slowly above the coals.

Around the fringes, forming a smiling corridor as the guests are ushered through, bronze, mustard, tobaccocolored, tan to ruddy, are the packed faces of the candongos who are gravely waiting their turn. They have on their best straw hats, their best clean Sunday shirts. Brown eyes squint in the dazzle of sun as they peer into the shadow under the aluminum roof to watch the proceedings.

Dr. Israél bustles about with an expert air making exploratory cuts with his pocketknife into the broiling beef. Ay, he complains, some of it is tough.

He shrugs and includes in one halfapologetic gesture all the countryside crowding in about the tables. “Politics,” he whispers in my ear. “How do you say in America?” he asks with his creaky laugh. “Poleetical fences?”

He straightens himself up, suddenly quite serious. The greatness of all this is the road, he is telling the candongos. Politicians come and go but the road will continue.

He leans over to cut a couple of strips of crackling off the roasting pig and hands them with a disarming grin to his guests. “Tell them back in America what a road means in Brazil.”

An attentive little man brings us heaped plates. The upland air makes for an appetite. As soon as the throngs begin to back off from the ravaged tables Dr. Israél has us on our way back to the airstrip. He is explaining that he wants us to see Paracatu, the town his wife, Dona Cora’s family came from.

The airstrip in Paracatu is too short even for the Beechcraft, so a small singlemotor job has flown in to take us there. My wife and I get to whispering and tittering together as we squeeze into seats in the tiny plane. What strikes us funny is how similar the political goings on at the churrasco were to what would be happening at a political oyster roast back in the northern neck of Virginia where we come from. The language, the costumes, the skintints are different, but the basic behavior, the jockeyings for position, the prestige of family, the playing up to local prejudices are so much the same that it’s laughable. This is the sort of country politicking we have at home. Under all the differences there are similarities between the Brazilian and the North American forms of democracy. I try to explain to Dr. Israél that we ought to get along because we have so many of the same vices but neither his English nor my Portuguese can carry the weight of my explanation. The pilot has his motor roaring so we can’t hear anything anyway. We grin and make funny faces at each other and we’re airborne again.

The plane follows the red streak of the road, blurred with dust where bulldozers are at work. Again the emptiness of eroded brown hills. Soon the little plane is circling over a green field. There’s a river. Dr. Israél points out washouts in the red clay where people years ago panned gold out of the creek beds. Canebrakes, bananatrees, a few mangoes and papayas among narrow tiled roofs faded gray with age. Hardly a sign of crops. “What on earth do they live on,” we feel like asking, “in Paracatu?”

An ancient rattletrap Chevrolet is waiting. Dr. Israél bundles us into it. The cobbled alleys of this little town weren’t built for cars. They are steep and narrow. Sunscorched ponies are tethered outside of every store. Brown countrymen ride past under broad hats. A team of four yokes of white oxen comes lounging magnificently through the dust. The place has a look of tightened belts, poverty, and nakedness. It swarms with flies. Dr. Israél is explaining that this is what all the back country is like before the highway comes.

Years and years ago they had gold. Then they had hunger. Soon they will have the highway.

With a shudder and a gasp the Chevrolet rattles to a stop in the central square opposite the church. The Franciscans operate a school there. We have a short talk with the schoolmaster, an earnest young Hollander who speaks a little English. Meanwhile Dona Cora has gone off in search of antiques: already we share her admiration for the simple elegance and the solid construction of the colonial furniture still to be picked up in these parts “for a song.”

We go along while Dr. Israél pays a call on a dreamylooking blond man who is evidently the local precinct boss for the Social Democrats. We sit in his parlor drinking cafezinhos and listening politely while he and Dr. Israél talk hurried politics in sibilant halfwhispers.

Disheveled little boys stare at us with grave gray eyes through the tall barred window that lets in the light off the square. A flock of them. They all are sandyhaired like their father. Our host looks too young to have produced so many. My Lord how many children people have in this country! “How do you ever feed them?” we feel like asking.

The two Brazilians remember their guests and make the conversation general. The road, they expain, will pass close to Paracatu. It will mean prosperity, rising land values, every house in town will be worth more. There will be buses, trucks to ship crops out, stores to buy things in, probably a bank. The eyes of the precinct boss mist with emotion as he points towards his boys who are pushing their pale faces against the bars in the window. “These,” he says, “will have a better life than I have had.”

Handicaps to Development

On the way back to the airstrip Dr. Israél begins to talk about that bank. A branch bank would be established, but what good would it do? The great roadblock to development throughout the country was the high cost of money. Suppose that fellow we’d been talking to wanted to set up some small factory that would employ people and give them much needed wages, he’d have to have funds. A bank would charge him twenty or thirty per cent interest, partly to cover inflation, but partly out of the old habits of medieval usury. Nobody could start a small enterprise under such a handicap. What impressed Dr. Israél most last time he’d visited the States was the cheap interest rates. No wonder we were so prosperous in North America.

Now he himself is a man — he gives us one of his famous grins — tolerably wellknown in the community. He ought to be what we called in America “a good credit risk,” but, not too long ago, he tried to borrow money to buy some cattle. He owns family lands out in this corner of the state that will only produce grazing every few years when the rainfall is sufficient. Well, an unusual rainfall gave abundant grass but when he’d tried to borrow money to buy cattle to eat it … impossible. There wasn’t much margin of profit in fattening cattle anyway. He found he couldn’t borrow the money to buy them at any interest rate that would make a profit possible … If he was in such a dilemma think of the poor man … and as close as Belo Horizonte there was a shortage of beef!

On the way back to the airstrip we pick up Dona Cora. “Good hunting?” Dr. Israél asks in mock despair. She nods. “Ay, ay.” Dr. Israél claps his hand to his wallet. “A pain in the pocketbook.”

Construction Site

After Paracatu the pilot follows the red streak of the new road. Where bulldozers are at work the sharp line blurs with dust. Again the emptiness of eroded hills. No trails now. We are flying over a wilderness of low shrubs and sourlooking flat lands spotted with round ponds left over from the last rains. After crossing into the state of Goiás the motors roar. The plane has begun to climb. The scrambled hills of Minas Gerais straighten out into the long hogbacks of the high plateau. The air is cooler.

Suddenly the road appears again. It’s a paved road now with traffic on it. Crossroads. Roads in every stage of completion. Cars, trucks, jeeps, buses move back and forth. The plane skirts a long ridge that bristles with scaffolding, concrete construction, cranes, bulldozers, earthmoving machinery. A file of dumptrucks parades down the center.

Dr. Israél points through the window. “Brasília.” He smiles and shrugs and frowns all at once. The shanty town unfolding below is known as Cidade Livre, the free city, a straggle of frame buildings painted in a dozen colors on either side of a broad dusty road. He insists on calling it “the provisional city.” In two or three years it will have done its work. They’ll tear it down. “The real city will take its place.”

Dr. Israél makes his pilot bank steeply to show his guests the beginnings of a dam in a shallow gorge where two broad valleys come together. That, he announces, is where the main power plant will be. He points in two directions with his arms, a swimming gesture: “All this is lake.”

At the point where the foundations of the city jut out into the future lake the broad windows of Niemeyer’s presidential palace glitter in the afternoon sun. They call it the Palace of the Dawn. Its strange columns gleam like a row of white kites set upside down. Off to the right the windows of the long low tourist hotel balance airily above the shadow of its open lower story. To the left rise the boxlike shapes of apartments and crisscross blocks of small concrete residences. The little white tentlike building on the brow of the hill is a church.

Already the plane is taxiing across the surfaced runways of the airport.

“The main landing strip will be 3300 meters long,” says Dr. Israél proudly as he ushers us into the temporary passenger terminal. “Already five airlines have established commercial flights to all parts of Brazil.”

The terminal is full of men in work clothes, candongos, engineers, machine operators, a few wives and children. Clothing, faces, baggage are stained with red dust.

“Brasília will have the first airport in the world specially designed for the age of jets,” Dr. Israél continues. “It is the first city planned from the air.”

As Dr. Israél piloted us through the future city we had trouble distinguishing what was really there from what was going to be there. It was like visiting Pompeii or Monte Alban, but in reverse. Instead of imagining the life that was there two thousand years ago we found ourselves imagining the life that would be there ten years hence.

The Brasília Palace Hotel was almost complete. Comfortable beds, airy rooms. Hot and cold water, electric light. To be sure the silence of the plateau was broken at night by the sound of hammering and sawing on the annex they are building out back and by the swish of shovels of men at work spreading soil for a garden between the restaurant’s glass wall and the curving edges of the tiled swimming pool.

Niemeyer’s strange mania for underground entrances has saddled the hotel with an unnecessarily inconvenient lobby. It surprised us to find in a pupil of Le Corbusier’s functionalism so little regard for the necessary functions of a building. In case of fire, we asked each other, how would we ever get out?

The presidential palace we found to be a singularly beautiful building of glass and white concrete, built long and low to fit into the long lines of the hills on the horizon, floating as lightly as a flock of swans on broad mirroring pools of clear water that flanked the entrance. The inner partitions were glass too. We did ask each other where, amid all those glass walls, the poor President could find a spot to change his trousers or a private nook to write a letter in.

From the palace we drove on a wide highway to what was to correspond to Capitol Hill in Washington: The Triangle of the Three Powers they called it. An enormous open space. Draglines were leveling the red clay hills. Drills like gigantic corkscrews were boring for the foundation piling. Here would rise the circular halls for the Senate and House and a pair of tileshaped steel and glass buildings behind to house their offices. These would be balanced by a building for the Supreme Court and another for the executive departments. From there a broad mall with many roadways would run between rows of ministries to the downtown center where the banks and the hotels and the theaters and the department stores were to be established. From this center, “like the wings of a jet plane,” in Lucio Costa’s words, were to stretch in either direction blocks of apartment buildings and private residences. To form the tail of the plane a continuation of the mall would stretch for miles in the direction of the eventual railroad station and the industrial suburbs.

There was not to be a traffic light in the city. Every intersection was to be by overpass or underpass. Unobstructed roadways would feed the traffic into the center of each block where ample parking space was foreseen under the open understories of the buildings. Automobile traffic would come in from the rear. The front of every apartment building or private house was to open on a landscaped square. Shopping centers on the North American suburban plan were to be built within walking distance of each residential block so that the paths for pedestrians would be separate from the automobile roads.

We found ourselves imagining the buildings to be, the great paved spaces, the lawns and gardens, the serried louvers and trellises shading the windows from the sun, the gleaming walls of tile and glass.

“This is the underground bus terminal,” said Dr. Israél, patting a wall of smooth red clay affectionately with his hand. “Escalators will take people up to the great paved central platform above … To the left is the theater and restaurant district … a little Montmartre.”

He bursts into his creaky laugh.

“Of course you think we’re mad. A man has to be a little mad to get anything accomplished in Brazil.”

His quarrel with his American engineers, he began to explain, was that they were not mad enough. They were helpful and practical but they were so accustomed to perfect machinery they had forgotten how to improvise. “In the old days you Americans were the greatest improvisers in the world.” In Brazil everything had to be improvised.

He went on to tell one of his favorite stories. Once when he was running the Rio Doce Company a flood took the piers out from under a steel bridge. Traffic stopped. If the ore stopped going out, the dollars stopped coming in. His American engineers said they could repair the bridge all right but they’d have to wait for a crane to come from the States. That crane would have taken months even if he’d had the dollars to buy it. Among the work gangs he found a gigantic Negro who said he knew how to get the bridge back on its piers without a crane …

I’d seen the great oxen in the Rio Doce? I nodded. Yes, I’d seen eleven yokes hitched together. How could one forget the great teams of oxen straining forward with the pondered magnificence of a frieze on an early Greek temple?…

Well, he went on excitedly, with a hundred oxen and levers and jacks and winches that illiterate Negro had the bridge open for traffic in nineteen days … “Improvise … that is my answer when people tell me that trying to build a capital out here on the plateau is a crazy project … Central Brazil must have roads, it must have buildings … out of sheer necessity we are improvising Brasília.”

The Boomtown Feeling

We found that the contagion of Dr. Pinheiro’s enthusiasm had infected the contractors and their engineers and foremen. The place steamed with boomtown excitement. “We all feel ten years younger than when we came,” was how his middle-aged secretary, Dr. Quadros, put it.

Dr. Quadros’ niece, Leonora Quadros, invited us to dinner at her small house out beyond the great compounds of the construction companies that covered the hillside across from the Novacap administration building. She was a handsome young woman of twentyeight. To our amazement we found that she was managing her father’s building materials business.

“That’s not the American idea of a Brazilian girl, now, is it?” she asked with a teasing smile. “In a new city everybody gets a chance.”

“It’s the need to improvise new ways of doing things that keeps us on our toes,” says the young man who was introduced as Brasília’s oldest inhabitant; he arrived even before they built Dom Bosco’s shrine.

Dom Bosco was an Italian missionary friar who prophesied a great civilization for the central uplands of Brazil. They had taken him for Brasília’s patron saint.

Asked if he intends to stay, the oldest inhabitant nods vigorously: “My life has become Brasília,” he says.

The young people around Leonora Quadros’ table seemed to have enlisted in the building of the city as you might enlist in a military campaign: for the duration. According to them the miracle was that construction had started at all. The city had advanced too far to be abandoned now, they insisted.

An American concern, Raymond Concrete and Pile, was already at work on the dam and the powerplant and the buildings for the eleven ministries. Business interests in São Paulo were vitally engaged. At least five important firms from Rio were involved. In all more than fifty Brazilian concerns were under contract for various phases of the work. A location had been chosen for an American embassy. The steel girders for the congress buildings were already arriving from the States.

Round the table they all talked at once. They showered us with statistics. Already forty thousand people at work. The hotel only took twelve months to complete; the palace, thirteen. In twenty months twelve million cubic feet of earth had been excavated. Two hundred and sixty kilometers of paved roads had been built, and more than six hundred kilometers of dirt roads.

Roads meant settlers. Already the administration of Nova-cap was at its wit’s end to find ways of keeping settlers out before housing could be found for them.

“How can you build an entire city in two years?”

The Oldest Inhabitant answered patly that two years ago nobody would have dreamed that Brazilians would win the world’s soccer championship. To complete Brasília would mean the world’s championship in city planning and modern architecture.

Everybody laughed when he proclaimed that architecture would outrank football as a national sport. Her architecture is the soul of the new Brazil, he insisted. That’s why he considered President Kubitschek a great man; because he understood the three basic impulses behind Brazilian progress: new roads, new cities, new buildings.

When Kubitschek’s choice of an architect came up everybody started arguing hammer and tongs about Niemeyer. Niemeyer’s buildings were impractical, said one. His work was magnificent, said another. The rafters rang with argument. “Niemeyer is only interested in how his buildings look from the outside,” said Dona Leonora in a ringing voice. “He keeps dumping insoluble problems in the lap of his engineers and contractors … He’s not an architect at all. He’s a sculptor, a sculptor with building materials.”

This statement brought an approving silence round the table.

A Sculptor with Building Materials

Niemeyer has remained a center of argument in Brazil.

When I met him at his workshop in Rio the first thing that struck me was his bashfulness. A small sober dishfaced man with mistrustful eyes. His married daughter had already presented him with a grandchild. Like so many Brazilians he looked younger than he was, but he must have been about fifty.

If you asked him a question he would throw away the answer the way an Englishman would. In a nation of voluble people he seemed remarkably chary of words. It was only after talking to him for some time that I began to notice a sort of broadshouldered assurance about him, like a bricklayer’s or stonemason’s assurance. There was a craftsman’s sharp definition about the way he used his hands. When he did speak it seemed straight from the heart. He was completely without side.

All sorts of European strains make up his family tree. Friends tell you that he had a random kind of youth. Couldn’t keep his mind on his schooling. He dabbled in sports. He did have a taste for drawing, but it wasn’t until he married at twentytwo that he took up architecture, and that, some cynics claim, was because his fatherinlaw was a contractor.

More likely his dedication to architecture stems from his association with Lucio Costa, who for a while was director of the School of Fine Arts in Rio. Lucio Costa has Socrates’ gift for infecting young people with his enthusiasms. At the time when Niemeyer studied with him modern architecture had already become the passion of his life. Niemeyer went to work in Lucio Costa’s drafting room. From then on there was no further doubt as to where Niemeyer’s career lay.

He used to claim he took architecture up as a sport, the way a man might take up soccer. Since his taking on the job of architect for Brasília he has sobered considerably. He even recently admitted in one of his rare public statements that this heavy responsibility had made him understand that the time had come to give up some of the freakish and playful experiments — Bohemianism, he called them — of his early work. Now he must pay more attention to construction.

Like most people who do first rate work in the arts Niemeyer thinks, feels and lives entirely in the terms of his craft. He likes to live well but he doesn’t care for money. About politics he is disconcertingly naïve. Though he claims to be a Communist and contributes to the Party war chest he designs churches and yachtclubs and gambling casinos with as much enthusiasm as he does workers’ apartments. His last work in Rio before leaving for Brasília was to finish the maquette for the crownshaped structure in glass and stressed concrete he planned for a national cathedral.

His domestic life is that of a middleclass Brazilian. He’s sluggish about many practical things. Like Parisians and Manhattanites, the Cariocas — as the people of Rio call themselves — can’t imagine living anywhere else than in their beautifully situated, overcrowded city. Niemeyer has the typical Carioca’s dread of travel. During his last days in Rio he seemed to be thinking more about how much he hated to leave his family and the pleasant dwelling he designed for himself, in the mountain valley high above one of Rio’s most beautiful stretches of coast, than about the glorious opportunities the Brasília project offered him as an architect. He cried out how hard it would be not to see his grandchild every day.

He has a horror of airplanes. The six hundred and fifty miles between Rio and Brasília will be a tough trek by car until the new road is finished. Once he tears himself away from Rio and settles in Brasília he seems to expect to stay there for the full two years. Did I think he’d be lonesome, he asked wistfully.

City Planner

Niemeyer would be the first to tell you that he considers it highly fitting that he will be working within the limits of Lucio Costa’s city plan because he considers Lucio Costa more than any other man to be the inspirer and initiator of the modern movement in Brazilian architecture.

Lucio Costa shuns publicity and public statements as much as Niemeyer does. He is so selfeffacing that he sometimes avoids taking credit for his own work. All the public ever sees or hears of him is an occasional glimpse of his aquiline profile and bushy mustache lurking in the background of a photograph of some group of architects.

It was through Lucio Costa that this whole generation of Brazilian architects was brought into contact with the stimulating European work of the twenties. Coming from a family prominent in the government and in the armed services, he had the European upbringing of the wealthy Brazilians of the period before the wars. His father was a naval officer and eventually an admiral. Born in Toulon, Costa learned to read in London and attended a Swiss boarding school. The Europe he was brought up in teemed with revolutionary ideas in the arts.

Costa’s attitude is that of the gifted amateur. As a boy he developed a taste for painting watercolors. In his teens he turned up in Rio to study design at the School of Fine Arts. There his interest in colonial architecture earned him the friendship of another talented and selfeffacing Brazilian, the Melo Franco de Andrade who devoted his life to the protection and restoration of Brazil’s rich heritage of baroque architecture. It was as a restorer of ancient monuments that Lucio Costa first took up architectural work. His early house plans were in the neocolonial style.

When Le Corbusier, the French theorist of glass and steel construction, first visited Brazil in 1929, Lucio Costa had prepared the way for him. He had already been telling the young architects about his work and the work of Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright and of the Italian futurists. They streamed out from the Frenchman’s lectures dizzy with the “functional” use of the new materials: concrete and steel and tile and glass. Already a Polish settler named Warschavchik had been designing dwellings in “functional” concrete for wealthy business men in São Paulo. The new architecture took root.

By the time Le Corbusier returned to Brazil for a second visit a dozen talented young draftsmen were ready to call him master. Niemeyer had become Lucio Costa’s intimate friend and collaborator. With Le Corbusier’s advice the two of them launched their first great project: the Ministry of Education and Health in Rio.

Lucio Costa was the first chairman of the board that worked out the plans. Characteristically Costa retired in time to let the spotlight fall on his protégé Niemeyer as chief designer of that highly successful construction. Again when the Brazilian pavilion for the New York World’s Fair in 1939 had to be designed, although Costa won the competition he claimed that Niemeyer’s entry was better than his own and in the end the two men collaborated on the final plan.

The design which Kubitschek commissioned for Pampulha was Niemeyer’s first job entirely on his own. He threw his cap over the windmill and developed a startlingly original style. Where Le Corbusier’s and Lucio Costa’s work had tended to straight lines and severe planes, Niemeyer was experimenting with the curves and swelling abstract forms of contemporary sculpture. When as President Kubitschek decided to stake his political future on the Brasília project he told Niemeyer he wanted him to design the new capital, all of it.

The Case Against

Like the wiseacres who raged against Belo Horizonte fifty years ago wellinformed people in Rio and São Paulo will prove to you with paper and pencil that the Brasília project is bound to fail. The Cariocas resent the loss of their capital. The whole scheme, they’ll tell you, was cooked up to enrich the State of Minas Gerais and its politicians. A gigantic real estate speculation at the expense of the Brazilian economy. The city, they claim, will turn out another grandiose failure like the group of watertowers in decorative ironwork in the style of the Eiffel Tower a mayor of Belém in Pará bought at a Paris world’s fair and set up in the center of the old tropical capital. From that day to this nobody has found any way to connect it to the city’s water system.

They point out that the Pampulha project was a financial failure. A federal law against gambling put the casino out of business. Snails in the lake threatened the residents with schistosomiasis. The bishop refused to consecrate Niemeyer’s gay little blue and white church. In the end a flood came which washed out the dam and left Niemeyer’s famous yacht-club high and dry.

President Kubitschek’s career, his opponents will tell you, has been littered with these unfinished enterprises. The municipal theater at Belo Horizonte was never completed. When Kubitschek left the governorship the building was invaded by squatters and became a slum. Brasília, editorial writers on the Rio newspapers were insisting, would turn out to be a desert favela on a colossal scale.

Why wasn’t the money spent for schools to combat Brazil’s seventy per cent illiteracy, or to start new industries or to stabilize finances, they ask. With the country swept by a ruinous inflation, they tell you, the last thing Brazil needs is the upkeep of a capital five hundred miles from nowhere.

Everything was being done backwards, they said. Instead of first building a presidential palace why didn’t they spend the money on a new railroad? The steel girders that had to be bought in the States were unloaded at Rio, shipped up to Belo Horizonte on the regular gauge railroad, then transferred to the narrow gauge that took them to Anápolis. In Anápolis they were hoisted onto trucks and driven by road to Brasília. Many materials and even drums of gasoline were flown in by air.

The hotel is all very well, these critics said, but wouldn’t it have been better to put the money into finishing the power plant and dam? Meanwhile electricity was being furnished by something like two hundred separate generators all using fuel oil or gasoline that had to be shipped seven hundred miles up from the coast.

In the summer of 1958 even people in favor of the transfer of the capital were claiming that time was against the project. The work couldn’t be completed in two years. The dam alone would take three.

On the chosen date Brasília would be inaugurated as the capital in a ceremonial sense, to be sure, but when Dr. Kubitschek’s term as President expired work would stop. His successor would certainly come from some other section of the country. No Brazilian politician liked to complete the work of any other politician. The new President would have other fish to fry. What buildings were already completed would remain as one more monument to the Brazilian mania for grandiose projects too hastily undertaken. Government workers and bureaucrats would continue to warm chairs in their offices in overcrowded Rio and to bask on its beautiful beaches. These sceptics were applying to the Brazilians the old adage that used to be applied to the Turks: always building, seldom finish, and never repair.

The Enthusiasm For

No matter how sceptical the Rio people may have been in the summer of 1958 about Brasília, the farmers and ranchers of the region seemed to believe in its future. At the Anápolis sales office for land in the new capital the agent said that although his office had only been open twenty days he had already sold fifty lots. The higher priced parcels went first. All the local business men seemed eager to invest. How many of them would build? Most of them, the agent thought. You got a fifteen per cent discount if you built in six months. At the Novacap office in Brasília the people in charge of sales seemed confident that eventually the sale of land would repay the cost of construction.

Brazilians plunge into real estate speculation with the enthusiasm of oldtime Floridians. The galloping inflation forces anyone who lays his hand on a few cruzeiros to invest the money in a piece of land or a house or a car or a radio rather than to see it lose buying power in a bank account. By the same token banks and corporations are driven continually to reinvest their funds.

Osorio, the young engineer from Belo Horizonte — recently graduated from the University of Miami — who drove us around in his jeep part of the time we were in Brasília, said he was already putting all he could save from his pay into a residential lot. Next he said he was planning to buy himself a piece of land within twenty or thirty miles of the capital and to plant it with eucalyptus trees. Eucalyptus would furnish a crop of timber every seven years. Everybody we met around Brasília, except the poor candongos who spent their money on drink and prostitutes down in the free city every payday, was investing in some phase of the enterprise. A sizable population was growing up with a stake in the completion of the city.

The augury most favorable to the success of Brasília lay, so it seemed to us, in the growth of Goiânia, a hundred and forty miles inland. Another invented city. Goiânia was designed a couple of decades ago by an architect named Attilio Lima. The plan was transferred right off the drafting board into the bush. When I was there on my way to visit Sayão’s colônia ten years before the town’s development had seemed completely stalled.

In 1958 we found Goiânia to be a flourishing city of fifty or sixty thousand people with paved treeshaded streets, an effective airport and several hotels, clean restaurants, hot and cold running water, and a great air of bustle and activity. Even streetcleaners. We saw them at work. Suburbs were springing up. The people in the stores looked wellfed and welldressed. A middleclass city like some small agricultural capital in the North American midwest. No sign of the desperate rural poverty that we still found in the outskirts of Anápolis, even though that much older settlement had developed mightily as a milling and cheesemaking center.

The road to Anápolis to be sure had not been paved but a broad graded thoroughfare had taken the place of the old rutted trail wandering through the wilderness.

People told us that in central Brazil their economy didn’t have the booms of the coffee country but that they didn’t have the slumps either. Their products were upland rice and beans and wheat and cattle, all items in short supply in a nation that still had to import much of its food from abroad. They were independent of the export market. They were feeding Brazilians and getting rich on it. Already they were flying beef to Belém.

To a certain extent Goiás and Mato Grosso seemed to have prospered on the economic misfortunes of the coast. The inflation, the disastrous droughts in the northeasterly bulge, poverty and overcrowding in the coast cities were forcing people to move inland in search of a square meal. Ten years before whole families were on the move on foot and by oxcart out into the agricultural colonies along the western river-valleys of Goiás. Now in 1958 the migration was mostly by truck. Pau de arara (parrot’s perches) they called these jouncing trucks. They were true pioneers. They came buoyed up by the certainty that nothing they found in the new settlements could be worse than the poverty they had left behind.

A month before our visit to Brasília there had occurred what the directors of Novacap still spoke of as “the inundation.” Fortyfive hundred people were unloaded from trucks almost overnight into the wilderness. They had heard about the new capital. They believed in Brasília. They wanted to settle there, so they arrived without asking leave of anybody.

The authorities at Novacap had plans drawn up to build what they called “satellite cities” to accommodate the population they knew would be attracted to the scene and to keep their capital city from becoming a rural slum before it was ever completed. They hadn’t expected to need these plans so soon.

“We improvise,” insists Dr. Pinheiro. In a few days they improvised a satellite city which they named Taguatinga.

Taguatinga was about twenty kilometers outside of the city limits of Brasília. To reach it we bounced over a rough road through a scrubby wilderness where an occasional rhea, the broadbilled South American ostrich, still loped among the termite nests. It certainly didn’t look like a country where a man could live off the land.

It was exactly a month after the town’s first settlement. We found hundreds of neat little houses ranged along recently staked out streets where watermains were already being laid. A pumping station had tapped what they claimed was an ample supply of water. Electric light was on its way. A moveable clinic in a whitepainted trailer furnished a firstaid station.

The mayor, a little old man dry and chipper as a cricket, turned out to have been a schoolmate of Dr. Pinheiro’s at Ouro Prêto. He was chosen he told us, because he knew how to get along with working people. He showed us the blueprint of the city in a little office that smelt of raw boards.

Any settler could occupy a ten by thirty meter lot without down payment, but he had to build a house immediately and within a reasonable time to start paying the five hundred cruzeiros monthly which would earn him title in five years. That was less than four dollars according to the exchange of the time. Many of these refugees from the droughtstricken regions of eastern Brazil and from Bahia and from the baked out towns in the backlands of Minas seemed to have brought a little money with them, enough to buy some building materials. A good many of their houses were brick with tile roofs. Some had one brick wall and the rest of rough boards, to be replaced later, so their owners told us. Perhaps half the settlers lived in shelters of palmettoleaf thatch.

We found an air of cheerful bustle about everybody we met. Everything seemed new and fresh. Most of the people had put up their houses themselves. They were full of hopes and plans. On the main street bars and groceries were springing up. One shack claimed to be a nightclub. A man who said he’d been a stonemason back in Ceará proudly showed off his stock of canned goods and dried fruits and peanuts and a few drums of kerosene. Business wasn’t too bad he said. That very day, so he told us, he’d made the first payment on his lot.

We were shown the parcel of land a French company had bought to set up a factory to make concrete culverts, the place where a brewery was about to move in, a small sawmill, a temporary laundry below the waterpump.

Beside a parked truck a priest was conducting an openair service. Little girls were waving palmfronds and singing. That’s where the church was going to be.

We were introduced to a contractor. His two daughters were schoolteachers. They were going to improvise a school.

There was even a young man from Ceres, who’d moved away because things didn’t move fast enough for him there. He owned a pickup truck. Everybody needed something hauled. He was doing a landoffice business. He was enthusiastic about his prospects. His friend was a housepainter. Everybody wanted something painted; more contracts than he’d ever imagined.

Most of the people worked in Brasília. A bus service was set up to take them back and forth. Their gripe was that the fare was too high. Otherwise they were delighted. They said they liked the upland air and the cool nights and the dry climate. Wages were better than they were accustomed to. They were convinced that by the time they took title to their lots their land would be worth a great deal more than they paid for it.

When the settlers at Taguatinga spoke about Brasília, about the expense of going back and forth from Brasília, it was as if the city actually existed. For them it was already a metropolis. These immigrants were not worried about the problems of finance and the difficulties of transportation any more than our immigrants were a hundred years ago when they settled the western states. They had sold everything they owned and moved out here in the wilderness hundreds of miles from their homes because they believed in Brasília.

Dom Bosco’s Dream

The evening before we went back to Rio we were standing beside Osorio’s jeep in front of a pointed white shrine on the brow of a hill overgrown with scraggly trees and dotted with the red clay nests of the termites. Behind us lay miles of dry silent wilderness. This shrine was the first building they put up, Osorio explained, to commemorate the missionary friar who forecast a future civilization for these central highlands. Dom Bosco’s statue looked out across a broad shadowy valley towards the streaks of dust that hung level in the evening air over the opposite ridge.

A faint roar came to us from the construction work. Draglines, bulldozers, sheepsfoot rollers, graders: earthmoving machines of every type were at work twentyfour hours a day leveling the summit of the long hogback which formed the center of Brazil’s new capital.

On the horizon beyond, the red sun set in purple behind a smooth distant ridge. Osorio pointed out the white upside down arches of the palace and the pontoon shape of the hotel and the blocks of apartments shapeless under their scaffolding.

“Soon you’ll see behind them the Triangle of the Three Powers and the downtown district. You can imagine them already,” he said, with a catch in his breath. “The neon lights will go on … You’ll see them reflected in the lake.”

He pointed out the location of the lot he had bought himself in the residential suburb across the lake from the city. The light scratches of a tractor trail around the flanks of the hills indicated where the lake level would be.

“You’ll go to your office in a rowboat?” He corrected me. “By motorboat,” he said.

A ragged grimy man with clearcut dark features stood looking intently up into Dom Bosco’s face as he listened to our conversation.

“Ask him how he got here. It’s miles from anywhere. Ours is the only car.”

“He lives here,” answered Osorio grinning. “He’s a charcoal burner from Mato Grosso. He’s cutting trees in all these valleys that will be flooded when they finish the dam.”

There was no house in sight. Night was coming on fast. The valleys were drowned in dusk. In the tricky light of the last gloaming you could swear you could see the completed city, reflected into the lake from the opposite ridge. The streaks of blue mist might be the surface of the water.

The ragged man, as pleased as if he were pointing out a mansion, pointed out a tiny leanto way down on the valley floor. “That’s my house,” he said proudly.

“But it’s at the bottom of the lake.”

The idea seemed to please the ragged man. “Of course.” He nodded delightedly. “I live at the bottom of the lake.”