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.