Brazil on the Move

“The Bestlaid Plans” …

You drive out to the airport in the steaming dark over the rackety cobbles of Manaus: you step into a jet plane and in four hours and a half you are in Brasília. It is the greatest contrast imaginable. Manaus is as redolent of the nineteenth century as a story by Jules Verne. The air is dense with green exhalations of the rainforest. Brasília is an arid red. The sun is hot but the air has a cool upland tang. The glimpses, as the plane banks for a landing, of glass and concrete constructions spread like an unfinished world’s fair along the red ridge, between the two arms of the lake, are desperately contemporary. You are reminded of the story that’s going the rounds about how a visiting Russian astronaut cried out on landing in Brasília: “I hadn’t expected to reach Mars so soon.”

In New York Brazilians told us: You mustn’t go to the hotel that was new four years ago. You must go to the new hotel. We found the new new hotel, though of course many floors were still unfinished, to be remarkably pleasant, with its big kidneyshaped swimming pool in the sunny central court, which was flanked by a firstrate restaurant. Under the same management as the Jaraguá in São Paulo it is probably one of the best in South America.

The Nacional stands on a rise overlooking the central bus station where the arterial roads that form the city’s backbone — the fuselage of Lucio Costa’s jet plane — converge through cloverleaves into the roads that serve the wings. From the front door you look out across a rubbly hillside which will someday be Lucio Costa’s modern Montmartre, past large Park Avenue type office buildings occupied by banks and insurance companies, down what corresponds to the mall in Washington, D.C. towards the shining tileshaped twin skyscrapers of the congressional offices. The confusing pile of masonry beyond the bus station will eventually become the white marble pyramid which will house Niemeyer’s interlocking theaters.

To get from the hotel to the bus station on foot is a scramble. If paths for pedestrians were included in the plans, they haven’t been built yet. There are of course no traffic lights. You have to wait for a lull and lope across the broad curving roadways as best you can. Many a pedestrian, so people tell us, has already lost his life on his way to the bus station.

When you finally reach the platform you can walk around in safety. Shining new Mercedes-Benz buses, produced in São Paulo, come in from all directions: Belo Horizonte, Anápolis, Ceres, Goiânia. Escalators take you to the upper levels. There are small stores, newsstands, snackbars, and coffee bars. The place has a cheerful practical look, except that the smooth-finished white concrete of the underpasses is already stained by the pervasive red dust.

There’s no way to see the town without a car. In Brasília a man without a car is a secondclass citizen. The poorer inhabitants will have to grow wheels instead of feet.

The two buildings that flank the Congress Square, the Palacio do Planalto for the executive departments, and the Supreme Court building, are oblongs of transparent glass, each shaded by a broad slab of concrete supported by delicate white buttresscolumns. To my way of thinking they are among Niemeyer’s best. Suited to the climate and the landscape. Fine examples of his paper cutout style. So are the odd little presidential chapel (which according to some irreverent people looks more like a urinal than a house of worship) and the charmingly simple Church of Our Lady of Fátima.

The congress building itself seems to me to be a conspicuous failure. The interior is cramped and illplanned for its purpose. There is a frivolous ugliness about the exterior hard to explain in a designer with such great talent for sculptural effects. Jefferson used to call architecture the most important of the arts “because it showed so much.” Possibly the design of the congress hall expresses the faithful Communist’s scorn for representative democracy.

Niemeyer’s cathedral, an enormous coronet of stressed concrete, remains unfinished. The design calls for glass to fill in the spaces between the soaring piers. It is impressive as it is. One wonders whether it should ever be finished.

Though the long horizontals of the apartment buildings suit the city plan better than the occasional outbreak of New York style skyscrapers, the routine monotony of their design becomes depressing. The apartments themselves, seen from the inside, show little interest on the part of the designers for the needs of the people who have to live in them. The rows of identical concrete hutches for lower income renters express, even more perfectly than some federal housing in the United States, the twentieth century bureaucrat’s disdain of the faceless multitudes to whose interests he is supposed to be devoted and whose exploitation furnishes his keep. The worst shack in the adjacent shantytowns of Cidade Livre or Taguatinga would be a better place to live.

Still, even after canvassing all the objections, you have to admit that the designers of Brasília have created a magnificent frame for a future city. The long straight thoroughfares, the vast open spaces between low white buildings are exhilarating. It’s a city for the automotive age, for the age of jets and helicopters. Its vast spaces match the vast smooth arid ridges of the landscape of the planalto.

The lake greatly enhances the effect of the city and of the landscape. It is blue. I was afraid it would turn out muddy. It reflects the desert clouds and the gaudy sunsets and the bright firmament of the upland nights. There’s a yachtclub and sailboats. We saw people fishing in it. Competent engineers after my last visit had told me so much about the possibility of seepage through the earth dam, that I had ceased to believe in the lake, but there it is, and protected from pollution by what looks to a layman like a thoroughly adequate sewage disposal plant.

Already signs are appearing of a post-Niemeyer architecture. The University of Brasília, which was only started some eight months back, is already conducting classes amid the hammering of carpenters and the dust of construction. Students on their way to lectures step over candongos laying tiled floors. The one building that’s almost finished, named Os Dois Candongos for two bricklayers who were killed in its construction, offers a series of wellproportioned whitewalled halls, some lit from above and some from the side, which open on patios landscaped with specimens of the native vegetation of the planalto. It’s all in human scale. A skillful balance — important under that glary sky — seems to have been struck between too little and too much light in the classrooms.

Courses in law, administration, humanities, Portuguese literature are already functioning. There is a school of architecture headed by Alcides da Rocha Miranda who designed the buildings we walked through. The curriculum so we were told is modeled on that of North American universities, and there is considerable emphasis, unusual in Brazil, on night school and extension courses for boys and girls who have to work to support themselves. The homey dormitory in frame and plaster with Japanese style woodwork balconies is a pleasure to look at after so much glass and concrete.

In the cafeteria there some of the teachers fed us one of the best feijoadas I ever ate. Feijoada is the Boston baked beans of Brazil and oddly enough also tends to appear on Saturdays. If the instruction proves as good as the cookery the University of Brasília should go far.

The Japanese, by the way, have added greatly to the variety of the architecture of Brasília by the daintily proportioned chancellery they have put up on their embassy lot. Our State Department, too, has done well with its chancellery. The courtyard is unusually attractive. There, and, in some of the suburban houses across the lake, you can see some intimation of the appearance of a Brasília style, suited to the light and to the climate and to the needs of the human beings who are going to inhabit the city.

When Oscar Niemeyer put up a residence to live in himself, way out of town near the country club, he built himself an oblong house with a tile roof and tall windows in the simple Brazilian colonial style which, in the first giddy enthusiasm for Le Corbusier’s glass and steel, used to be considered hopelessly outmoded. People tell you he only built it to please his wife, but there it is.

How to Till the Planalto

Brasília is hungry for green. In areas laid out for parks and squares you see expanses of driedup turf, dead saplings, shriveled shrubberies testifying to the unsuccessful efforts of some municipal gardener. Not even palms seem to be doing well. Vegetation has a look of struggling not only against drought but against some peculiar quality in the soil.

Four years before we had seen the grim faces of a Japanese family trying, in what looked like a tolerable piece of bottomland, to grow truck crops. Even their hardiest vegetables, like cabbage and squash, had a sickly look. If the Japanese can’t grow vegetables on a piece of land, there is something wrong.

After considerable asking around we were introduced to a gentleman from Paraná. He had emigrated to Brazil from Germany thirtyseven years before. He started as an interpreter with the federal Department of Agriculture, became a Brazilian citizen, and now owned land in Paraná where he did well, so he said, with the sale of timber. He also raised coffee and longstaple cotton. He was in Brasília to set up a tourist agency. With his help we found the agricultural experiment station at Sucupira.

The Brazilian agronomist in charge immediately cried out that he’d lost his Americans. The place had been set up under Point Four. He’d had a Texan, a Virginian, a Californian, and a man from Minnesota. He couldn’t speak too highly of their work. He missed them as friends. When the Point Four money ran out they’d had to pack up and go home.

When the tug of war between the Brazilian congress and President Goulart was resolved so that the federal government got moving again, he hoped to secure Brazilian funds through the Ministry for Agriculture. Now everything was at a standstill. His tractors and mowers were all American. He needed parts. But the first thing he’d do, he said, was to get his American agronomists back. They had promised to come.

He drove us around the fields they had planted in various grasses on terraced hillsides. Some were local and some imported. Many of them looked flourishing. He said that by planting the proper grasses there were plenty of places in the outskirts of Brasília where you could graze cattle successfully. The soils of the planalto, he claimed, had the chemical nutrients needed for agriculture. Only they were locked up. In the States we could use lime to unlock our soils. Here the formula would have to be different but it was known. Technically the problem was solved. It was a question of funds.

Driving back we passed a cutting for the railroad. I said I’d been told the railroad line had been abandoned. It seemed a pity. Quite the contrary, said our friend from Paraná. There were only twelve more kilometers of track left to lay of a broad gauge line all the way from Belo Horizonte. Freight-service would start by the end of the year. Passengers would continue to use buses and planes.

When he deposited us back at the hotel he showed us what he had in his pockets. Cloth bags full of topazes and aquamarine. He’d been to Cristalina, only a short trip off the main road to Belo Horizonte. Of course there was the cost of cutting them, but in Cristalina you could pick topazes up off the street. His eyes sparkled like the gems. That was Brazil.

“And He saw that it was good”

One of the pleasantest things about this last visit to Brasília was to be driven around by Dr. Israél. Four years before we had seen him at work managing Novacap. He’d been the city’s first prefeito, but now after five years of intense administrative effort, he had been retired by the Goulart administration. Brasília had become his whole life. He couldn’t move away. He lived in the residential suburb across the lake. He must have gotten special soil somewhere. His garden was flourishing. He showed us roses in bloom.

We drove through immense bare expanses of parts of the city that were not even planned yet and around the lake shore to the dam and down to the hydroelectric plant by the waterfall below it. Young Germans from Siemens were putting through the last tests on the two freshly installed generators. There was room for one more when it was needed. Light and power in three weeks, they promised Dr. Israél. He grinned his longtoothed grin and slapped them on the back.

“You see … They said we’d have no lake. They said we’d have no power.”

He took us to see the frame building at the highest point of the surrounding country where he and President Kubitschek had their quarters in the early days. The place was already a public park and picnic ground, presided over by a new bronze statue of the former president.

You could still see the outlines of the old fazenda which had been the only inhabited spot when the city planners first arrived. The great gushing spring of clear water was still there in the gully among the tall trees but now it was enclosed in a wire fence to keep the picnickers at the park from straying into the adjacent grounds. The country club had taken over the fazenda’s magnificent grove of mangoes for its own private picnickings. Four years before we looked out from under the great dark trees on an incredibly vast prospect of bare hills occupied only by termites and rheas, the odd longlegged wolves and the striped cats of the region. Now the hills were scarred with roads. There were crosshatchings of suburban constructions. Scraps of the city’s skyline jutted up into the horizon.

It was a nostalgic expedition. Dr. Israél showed us the entrance to the beautiful house beside a small waterfall tumbling into a natural rock basin which he’d occupied as prefeito. The new prefeito lived there now. In the old days the place had been known by Dr. Israél’s initials: I.P. The new administration made out that it was named after a yellowflowered tree that grows along the watercourses, called in those parts the ipé.

One of the inconveniences of life in Brasília in the summer of 1962 was that the light and power almost inevitably would fail just about seven every evening. Some said it was because the officials of the state of Goiás who controlled the hightension lines from the Cachoeira Dourada (the Golden Waterfall) on the Paranaíba River, from which the power came, would pull the switch as a hint that the federal city better hurry up and pay its bills. Even at the efficient Hotel Nacional, guests would be trapped in the elevators and imprisoned for hours. The forewarned would avoid the elevators at this time of day and grope their way with candles down the unfinished stairways to the lobby.

The lights failed the very night Dr. Israél invited us to dinner. As it was a moonless night we had to find his house by the light of the Milky Way. He gave one of his snorting laughs as he met us with a candle. “You saw the new generators,” he said. “Come back a month from now and this won’t happen.”