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 mainpower 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 arebuilding 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
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 mainpower 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 arebuilding 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
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