The vision
A modernist capital shaped like an airplane, designed by Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer to drag Brazil into the future in 41 months.
Context
Built from scratch on the Cerrado plateau, Brasília separated work, residence, leisure and traffic into discrete zones — the textbook expression of CIAM functionalism at urban scale.
What happened
Inaugurated on schedule in 1960 and now a UNESCO World Heritage site, but the planned core houses elites while ~90% of the metro lives in unplanned 'satellite cities' the master plan refused to acknowledge.
Why it fell short
- Pedestrian-hostile superblocks separated by motorways
- Functional segregation killed the mixed-use street
- Working class pushed into informal peripheries from day one
- Monumental scale prioritized aerial photographs over human experience