Oscar 102/Brasilia 50 is the work of Farès el-Dahdah, a longtime professor at Rice who changed his specialty about ten or fifteen years ago from literary tropes in architecture to what seems to me to be the much more appealing study of Brazil’s tropical modern architecture. Brasilia has a special place in el-Dahdah’s heart since, as he told us when I took his Brasilia seminar in 2001, it was where he attended high school and a place of much youthful pleasure. The title refers to the ages in 2010 of celebrated Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer (1907-) and that of its purpose-built capital city, Brasilia. He justifies the book in his typical light-hearted way: “The mere intersection of Niemeyer’s centenary (plus two) and Brasilia’s fiftieth anniversary was sufficient pretext to conduct a studio in the fall 2007 at Rice University’s School of Architecture.” The content includes eight essays by el-Dahdah examining various aspects of Brasilia and “causes célèbres in the history of Brazil’s contribution to modern architecture,” each supplemented by a student-produced “dossier” of computer models, diagrams, and occasional essays. The book begins and ends with spreads of splendid photos depicting several of Niemeyer’s best known buildings that the students visited during the course of the studio. I particularly liked these photos, which were taken by Luisina Wilfong and Lylse Oliveros, because of the manner in which they indicated effects of the passage of time on the modern buildings. There were smudges of black mold on the curving fascia of Niemeyer’s house in Rio de Janeiro. A slightly crooked chartreuse fire hydrant stands sentry with two costumed guards in front of the Planalto Palace. Some of the marble revetment looked about to pop from the awesomely long pedestrian ramp leading up to the roof of the Congress (which, by the way, has no handrails to speak of).
El-Dahdah has completely immersed himself in minutiae of his subject as the numerous references to letters in archives, emails to descendents of key players, and the inclusion of many sketches and drawings by Niemeyer and other architects of the period demonstrates. The most intriguing essays to me were those that explored the back and forth dialogue between Le Corbusier and his Brazilian colleagues. Le Corbusier visited Rio de Janeiro in 1936 at the invitation of the éminence grise of modernity in Brazil, Lucio Costa (1902-1998). A wily figure, Costa promoted modernism while at the same time serving as the decades-long director of the Serviço do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional (the Brazilian national heritage service). Costa had been entrusted to the design of a new building for the Ministry of Education and Health and wished to consult with Le Corbusier, in his mind a visionary of an ability that only appears at “intervals of centuries.” The resulting building, completed in 1944, has been heralded as one of the canons of modern architecture. As the protracted design process stretched out over several sites and innumerable schemes, ego played its role and both the Brazilian design team lead by Costa and Niemeyer and Le Corbusier ended up claiming credit for what was clearly a solution that neither would have arrived at alone. In other essays el-Dahdah charts the nuances of similar situations with regards to such other famous buildings as Brazil’s pavilion at the New York World’s Fair (1939) and the United Nations Headquarters Building (1952).
The last three essays address Brasilia. The genesis of this city, its inaugural sectors built in short three years on an arid, treeless plain, more than 600 km from the nearest paved road, is almost legendary. Costa’s winning proposal for its design consisted of fifteen little sketches and accompanied by an essay that began: Não pretendia competir e, na verdade, não concorro—apenas me desvencilho de uma solução possível, que não foi procurada mas surgiu, por assim dizer, já pronta (“It was not my intention to enter the competition—nor indeed am I really so doing. I am merely liberating my mind from a possible solution which sprang to it as a complete picture, but which I had not sought.”), thus casting a wonderfully subversive, existential doubt on the entire project. The plan of Brasilia is composed of 120 large superquadras, or residential blocks, intended to house about 2,500 people ranged symmetrically in four parallel, curving rows about a shorter, perpendicular “monumental axis” containing the buildings of the government. Roadways on the scale of freeways connect the various parts of the city. Almost from the start, Brasilia has been criticized for its anti-urban qualities when compared to traditional, densely built cities. However, as el-Dahdah points out, “to live in a superquadra means access to ‘financial stability, home ownership, individual cars, schools, cinemas, theaters, clubs, green spaces, viable roads without traffic and where physical safety is guaranteed to go to work and back, in sum, access to the city in all it signifies as a way of life.’” It reminds me of living in Houston, another city criticized for the many of the same reasons. Although, el-Dahdah continues, “a city without the traditional street or street corner can very well have other viable public spaces and that social ecologies can easily adapt to unprecedented urban forms,” the sections on Brasilia do not seem to explore this in a significant way. It would have been fascinating if some of the student dossiers, which in general I found to be vague or burdened with jargon-loaded sentences, focused on what it is like to spend your days in such a place. Perhaps it would have uncovered some of the common ground between Brasilia, Houston, and other contemporary, suburban cities that make them desirable places to live for so many people despite the critics’ protests.
Oscar 102/Brasilia 50
Architecture at Rice 46, Houston: Rice School of Architecture, 2010
Picture from What We See blog showing a participant in "Jane's Walk," where Toronto students donned Jacobs-styled spectacles and were asked guiding questions to engage their senses about their neighborhood
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Fascinating though these projects are, ariel nichole soma, What We See cannot be breezed through. At times, Online soma without rx, the collection is weighed down with policy. Some readers might find the prose too dependent on jargon. And most of the essays assume the reader’s familiarity with Jacobs’s books and biography, Purchase Soma. Still, if What We See requires, soma track pedal, at times, a professional’s duty-bound doggedness, Soma prozac, it rewards the general reader’s generosity. The best selections inspire a kind of covetousness, as they present projects or politics you might want for your own city, for your own family to use and enjoy, soma group.
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We might be, as in 1961, need soma shipped to texas, at the beginning of another upheaval in 2010. The oil pouring into the Gulf Coast might staunch one kind of dependence. Our world might be changing, Purchase Soma. Description soma watson, Meanwhile, the ideals and plans featured in What We See — sustainable building initiatives, bicycle greenway networks, neighborhood revitalizations, online pharmacy phentermine soma, recycling programs, residential planning that considers the needs of the family — are all gaining momentum in the collective imagination, Soma magazine, and all are plans to make our cities better. To change them, as Jacobs urged almost 50 years ago, we must learn to see them again, buy soma for cheap.
What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs, ed. Soma multi purpose creme, Stephen A. Goldsmith,
Lynne Elizabeth. New Village Press, 2010.
$26.95, hardcover
An interactive website and blog called What We See: A Civic Engagement Project expands on the themes and questions of the book. .
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