Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

Oscar Niemeyer, world-famous architect, has been a friend of President Kubitschek ever since building a house for him, the first modern house in Belo Horizonte, when Kubitschek was mayor of that city. Later, when Kubitschek was governor of the state of Minas Gerais, he commissioned Niemeyer to build the resort of Pampulha, just outside Belo Horizonte, which is the state’s capital. Now Niemeyer is responsible for all public buildings to be built in Brasília. In 1956 a competition was held for a “pilot-plan” for the new city of five hundred thousand people. It was any architect’s dream come true, and dozens of plans were submitted, some extremely elaborate and detailed, down to suburbs and agricultural belts. Lucio Costa, Brasil’s leading older architect and a friend and sponsor of Niemeyer since his student days, felt that at that early stage nothing very detailed should be attempted. He submitted only five or six little sketches, drawn rapidly, apparently, on small sheets of an inferior grade of paper. But his pilot-plan was immediately recognized as a brilliant little tour de force, and it was unanimously awarded the first prize, equal to about fourteen thousand dollars.

Following it, the city is laid out in the form of an aeroplane, or is it a bird, heading east, with a body seven or eight miles long. The wings, seven and a half miles across, will be the residential districts; the shopping center is at the tail; the body contains banks and office-buildings; along about the thorax come the foreign ministries, and the head is the “Esplanade of the Three Powers”: Judiciary, Administrative, and Executive — this last being, on paper, Niemeyer’s most spectacular and ambitious project to date. Set apart from the aeroplane or bird, to the east of its head, are the Brasília Palace Hotel and the Palácio da Alvorada (or “Palace of the Dawn”), the presidential residence, the only two large buildings completed at present; indeed, except for one small church and the foundations or skeletons of five blocks of apartment houses, they are almost the only permanent buildings to be seen.

For a recent number of Modulo, the Brasilian architectural magazine, Niemeyer wrote an article called “Testimony,” lofty in tone but uneasy as to logic, about his work for Brasília. Politically he is a communist and in his “testimony” he takes himself to task for his past errors and promises to do better in the future, in the best communist manner. He says he still believes “that until there is a just distribution of wealth — which can reach all sectors of the population — the basic objective of architecture, that is, its social foundation, will be sacrificed, and the role of architect will be relegated to waiting upon the whims of the wealthy classes.” He confesses to having done this in the past, to having thought of architecture as a “game” and even having deliberately built houses with eccentricities and extravagances for their rich owners “to talk about.” But from now on, he says, things will be different; he intends that his works for Brasília shall all be “useful and permanent and capable of evoking a little beauty and emotion.”

It might strike a critical visitor as ironical that for over two years thousands of workers have been left to build wooden houses or shacks and shift for themselves, while the first two buildings to be completed should both be called “Palace.” However, to be fair, besides the Free City, attempts are being made to provide decent housing for workers and white-collar workers. Two blocks of five hundred houses each, “row” houses, designed by Niemeyer, have already been built by the Fundação da Casa Popular, and five “superblocks” of apartments are now going up, financed by five of the Brasilian institutos, a form of syndicate peculiar to Brasil, handling pensions, hospitalization, or loans, or functioning, as in this case, as banks.

At the end of four years, when enough housing will have been completed, the Free City is supposed to be razed; in fact, by then, one branch of the artificial lake is supposed to be rippling above its streets. Those most violently opposed to Brasília cynically predict that the Free City will never be razed; that it will remain and probably grow, the slums of the future city, like the wild and uncontrollable growth of shacks that now surrounds Rio de Janeiro.

(Also to be fair it should be explained that although the word “palace” for a president’s residence may sound strange to American ears, in Latin countries the word does not have the overtones of royalty it has for us. It can mean merely “mansion,” and palacete, “small palace,” is often used for any large house.)

Surely it is to Kubitschek’s credit that he has probably the most sophisticated taste in architecture of any head of any government. Educated Brasilians are apt to feel that although their country is in a bad transitional period, backwards in many respects, and may not have made much of a stir in the other arts, it has reason to be proud of its contemporary architecture. The outstandingly beautiful Ministry of Education building in Rio was begun in 1937, the very first and still one of the very few government buildings to be commissioned in modern international style. (Chandigarh was not begun until almost fifteen years later.) After all, Kubitschek could have chosen to build an Old Colonial capital, or a Greek-and-Roman, or even one in a particularly monstrous Swiss-chalet style that has sometimes been thought appropriate for Brasil. But as far as his choice of style goes the only objections I have heard of have been from the Army, which does not feel that an airy, glassy, or floating edifice will represent its view of things. But perhaps all generals secretly yearn for crenellations and drawbridges.

* * *

A friend of mine, a Rio interior decorator who had just finished doing up the new hotel, had made reservations for me by two-way radio. The Brasília Palace Hotel is in one block, a hundred and thirty-five rooms, one room thick and three stories high; only a small central section rests on the ground, the rest of the building on either side being supported by concrete pillars covered with black-anodized aluminum. At night these pillars almost disappear and the hotel appears to float like a luxury-liner, an effect that seems to be dear to Niemeyer’s heart these days.

The entrance, reminding me vaguely of a New York subway entrance, is down a flight of steps into a sunken lobby; over it, at ground level, is a large, pleasant lounge, full of Saarinen chairs and marble-topped coffee-tables. The three floors of rooms face east to the Palace of the Dawn; three corridors run the full length of the west side of the building. There is one public staircase, about four feet wide, and two small elevators (one was not working when we were there), each holding at the most six people, so that there will certainly be serious traffic problems when the hotel is filled with its quota of three hundred guests. The entire west wall is made of large blocks of cement, five inches or so thick, and regularly set into each block are rows of little round glasses — real drinking glasses, the bell boys like to inform one — their circle-ridged bottoms sealing the wall on the outside. They let in the light in thousands of spots on the walls and gray carpeting of the corridors, an effect that is extremely pretty but unfortunately, from the moment the sun starts down the western sky until early next morning, fiendishly hot. Also, I wondered how could the insides of all those little glasses ever be cleaned? Already the more casual type of guest had begun to leave cigarette butts and other odds and ends in those within reach. Between each floor a row of blocks has been left without the glasses; the holes open into an airspace above the halls, where small screened openings alternate with light fixtures along the ceilings. This is supposed to provide ventilation, but not a breath of air came from the vents, and at night, when I walked the corridor to my room at the very end, before reaching its white formica doorway I would be dizzy from the heat. The bathroom ceilings are pierced with holes into this common airspace, too, with the unhappy result that one clearly hears the man next door taking his bath, limb by limb. The rooms, however, are large and cool, and except for the dressing-tables, well furnished. In the dressing-table mirrors a woman of barely average height (myself) sees only her chin.