Brazil on the Move

by John Dos Passos

  “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.

  He used to claim he took architecture up as a sport, the way a man might take up soccer. Since his taking on the job of architect for Brasília he has sobered considerably. He even recently admitted in one of his rare public statements that this heavy responsibility had made him understand that the time had come to give up some of the freakish and playful experiments—Bohemianism, he called them—of his early work. Now he must pay more attention to construction.

  Like most people who do first rate work in the arts Niemeyer thinks, feels and lives entirely in the terms of his craft. He likes to live well but he doesn’t care for money. About politics he is disconcertingly naïve. Though he claims to be a Communist and contributes to the Party war chest he designs churches and yachtclubs and gambling casinos with as much enthusiasm as he does workers’ apartments. His last work in Rio before leaving for Brasília was to finish the maquette for the crownshaped structure in glass and stressed concrete he planned for a national cathedral.

  His domestic life is that of a middleclass Brazilian. He’s sluggish about many practical things. Like Parisians and Manhattanites, the Cariocas—as the people of Rio call themselves—can’t imagine living anywhere else than in their beautifully situated, overcrowded city. Niemeyer has the typical Carioca’s dread of travel. During his last days in Rio he seemed to be thinking more about how much he hated to leave his family and the pleasant dwelling he designed for himself, in the mountain valley high above one of Rio’s most beautiful stretches of coast, than about the glorious opportunities the Brasília project offered him as an architect. He cried out how hard it would be not to see his grandchild every day.

  He has a horror of airplanes. The six hundred and fifty miles between Rio and Brasília will be a tough trek by car until the new road is finished. Once he tears himself away from Rio and settles in Brasília he seems to expect to stay there for the full two years. Did I think he’d be lonesome, he asked wistfully.

  City Planner

  Niemeyer would be the first to tell you that he considers it highly fitting that he will be working within the limits of Lucio Costa’s city plan because he considers Lucio Costa more than any other man to be the inspirer and initiator of the modern movement in Brazilian architecture.

  Lucio Costa shuns publicity and public statements as much as Niemeyer does. He is so selfeffacing that he sometimes avoids taking credit for his own work. All the public ever sees or hears of him is an occasional glimpse of his aquiline profile and bushy mustache lurking in the background of a photograph of some group of architects.

  It was through Lucio Costa that this whole generation of Brazilian architects was brought into contact with the stimulating European work of the twenties. Coming from a family prominent in the government and in the armed services, he had the European upbringing of the wealthy Brazilians of the period before the wars. His father was a naval officer and eventually an admiral. Born in Toulon, Costa learned to read in London and attended a Swiss boarding school. The Europe he was brought up in teemed with revolutionary ideas in the arts.

  Costa’s attitude is that of the gifted amateur. As a boy he developed a taste for painting watercolors. In his teens he turned up in Rio to study design at the School of Fine Arts. There his interest in colonial architecture earned him the friendship of another talented and selfeffacing Brazilian, the Melo Franco de Andrade who devoted his life to the protection and restoration of Brazil’s rich heritage of baroque architecture. It was as a restorer of ancient monuments that Lucio Costa first took up architectural work. His early house plans were in the neocolonial style.

  When Le Corbusier, the French theorist of glass and steel construction, first visited Brazil in 1929, Lucio Costa had prepared the way for him. He had already been telling the young architects about his work and the work of Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright and of the Italian futurists. They streamed out from the Frenchman’s lectures dizzy with the “functional” use of the new materials: concrete and steel and tile and glass. Already a Polish settler named Warschavchik had been designing dwellings in “functional” concrete for wealthy business men in São Paulo. The new architecture took root.

  By the time Le Corbusier returned to Brazil for a second visit a dozen talented young draftsmen were ready to call him master. Niemeyer had become Lucio Costa’s intimate friend and collaborator. With Le Corbusier’s advice the two of them launched their first great project: the Ministry of Education and Health in Rio.

  Lucio Costa was the first chairman of the board that worked out the plans. Characteristically Costa retired in time to let the spotlight fall on his protégé Niemeyer as chief designer of that highly successful construction. Again when the Brazilian pavilion for the New York World’s Fair in 1939 had to be designed, although Costa won the competition he claimed that Niemeyer’s entry was better than his own and in the end the two men collaborated on the final plan.

  The design which Kubitschek commissioned for Pampulha was Niemeyer’s first job entirely on his own. He threw his cap over the windmill and developed a startlingly original style. Where Le Corbusier’s and Lucio Costa’s work had tended to straight lines and severe planes, Niemeyer was experimenting with the curves and swelling abstract forms of contemporary s
culpture. When as President Kubitschek decided to stake his political future on the Brasília project he told Niemeyer he wanted him to design the new capital, all of it.

  The Case Against

  Like the wiseacres who raged against Belo Horizonte fifty years ago wellinformed people in Rio and São Paulo will prove to you with paper and pencil that the Brasília project is bound to fail. The Cariocas resent the loss of their capital. The whole scheme, they’ll tell you, was cooked up to enrich the State of Minas Gerais and its politicians. A gigantic real estate speculation at the expense of the Brazilian economy. The city, they claim, will turn out another grandiose failure like the group of watertowers in decorative ironwork in the style of the Eiffel Tower a mayor of Belém in Pará bought at a Paris world’s fair and set up in the center of the old tropical capital. From that day to this nobody has found any way to connect it to the city’s water system.

  They point out that the Pampulha project was a financial failure. A federal law against gambling put the casino out of business. Snails in the lake threatened the residents with schistosomiasis. The bishop refused to consecrate Niemeyer’s gay little blue and white church. In the end a flood came which washed out the dam and left Niemeyer’s famous yacht-club high and dry.

  President Kubitschek’s career, his opponents will tell you, has been littered with these unfinished enterprises. The municipal theater at Belo Horizonte was never completed. When Kubitschek left the governorship the building was invaded by squatters and became a slum. Brasília, editorial writers on the Rio newspapers were insisting, would turn out to be a desert favela on a colossal scale.

  Why wasn’t the money spent for schools to combat Brazil’s seventy per cent illiteracy, or to start new industries or to stabilize finances, they ask. With the country swept by a ruinous inflation, they tell you, the last thing Brazil needs is the upkeep of a capital five hundred miles from nowhere.

  Everything was being done backwards, they said. Instead of first building a presidential palace why didn’t they spend the money on a new railroad? The steel girders that had to be bought in the States were unloaded at Rio, shipped up to Belo Horizonte on the regular gauge railroad, then transferred to the narrow gauge that took them to Anápolis. In Anápolis they were hoisted onto trucks and driven by road to Brasília. Many materials and even drums of gasoline were flown in by air.

  The hotel is all very well, these critics said, but wouldn’t it have been better to put the money into finishing the power plant and dam? Meanwhile electricity was being furnished by something like two hundred separate generators all using fuel oil or gasoline that had to be shipped seven hundred miles up from the coast.

  In the summer of 1958 even people in favor of the transfer of the capital were claiming that time was against the project. The work couldn’t be completed in two years. The dam alone would take three.

  On the chosen date Brasília would be inaugurated as the capital in a ceremonial sense, to be sure, but when Dr. Kubitschek’s term as President expired work would stop. His successor would certainly come from some other section of the country. No Brazilian politician liked to complete the work of any other politician. The new President would have other fish to fry. What buildings were already completed would remain as one more monument to the Brazilian mania for grandiose projects too hastily undertaken. Government workers and bureaucrats would continue to warm chairs in their offices in overcrowded Rio and to bask on its beautiful beaches. These sceptics were applying to the Brazilians the old adage that used to be applied to the Turks: always building, seldom finish, and never repair.

  The Enthusiasm For

  No matter how sceptical the Rio people may have been in the summer of 1958 about Brasília, the farmers and ranchers of the region seemed to believe in its future. At the Anápolis sales office for land in the new capital the agent said that although his office had only been open twenty days he had already sold fifty lots. The higher priced parcels went first. All the local business men seemed eager to invest. How many of them would build? Most of them, the agent thought. You got a fifteen per cent discount if you built in six months. At the Novacap office in Brasília the people in charge of sales seemed confident that eventually the sale of land would repay the cost of construction.

  Brazilians plunge into real estate speculation with the enthusiasm of oldtime Floridians. The galloping inflation forces anyone who lays his hand on a few cruzeiros to invest the money in a piece of land or a house or a car or a radio rather than to see it lose buying power in a bank account. By the same token banks and corporations are driven continually to reinvest their funds.

  Osorio, the young engineer from Belo Horizonte—recently graduated from the University of Miami—who drove us around in his jeep part of the time we were in Brasília, said he was already putting all he could save from his pay into a residential lot. Next he said he was planning to buy himself a piece of land within twenty or thirty miles of the capital and to plant it with eucalyptus trees. Eucalyptus would furnish a crop of timber every seven years. Everybody we met around Brasília, except the poor candongos who spent their money on drink and prostitutes down in the free city every payday, was investing in some phase of the enterprise. A sizable population was growing up with a stake in the completion of the city.

  The augury most favorable to the success of Brasília lay, so it seemed to us, in the growth of Goiânia, a hundred and forty miles inland. Another invented city. Goiânia was designed a couple of decades ago by an architect named Attilio Lima. The plan was transferred right off the drafting board into the bush. When I was there on my way to visit Sayão’s colônia ten years before the town’s development had seemed completely stalled.

  In 1958 we found Goiânia to be a flourishing city of fifty or sixty thousand people with paved treeshaded streets, an effective airport and several hotels, clean restaurants, hot and cold running water, and a great air of bustle and activity. Even streetcleaners. We saw them at work. Suburbs were springing up. The people in the stores looked wellfed and welldressed. A middleclass city like some small agricultural capital in the North American midwest. No sign of the desperate rural poverty that we still found in the outskirts of Anápolis, even though that much older settlement had developed mightily as a milling and cheesemaking center.

  The road to Anápolis to be sure had not been paved but a broad graded thoroughfare had taken the place of the old rutted trail wandering through the wilderness.

  People told us that in central Brazil their economy didn’t have the booms of the coffee country but that they didn’t have the slumps either. Their products were upland rice and beans and wheat and cattle, all items in short supply in a nation that still had to import much of its food from abroad. They were independent of the export market. They were feeding Brazilians and getting rich on it. Already they were flying beef to Belém.

  To a certain extent Goiás and Mato Grosso seemed to have prospered on the economic misfortunes of the coast. The inflation, the disastrous droughts in the northeasterly bulge, poverty and overcrowding in the coast cities were forcing people to move inland in search of a square meal. Ten years before whole families were on the move on foot and by oxcart out into the agricultural colonies along the western river-valleys of Goiás. Now in 1958 the migration was mostly by truck. Pau de arara (parrot’s perches) they called these jouncing trucks. They were true pioneers. They came buoyed up by the certainty that nothing they found in the new settlements could be worse than the poverty they had left behind.

  A month before our visit to Brasília there had occurred what the directors of Novacap still spoke of as “the inundation.” Fortyfive hundred people were unloaded from trucks almost overnight into the wilderness. They had heard about the new capital. They believed in Brasília. They wanted to settle there, so they arrived without asking leave of anybody.

  The authorities at Novacap had plans drawn up to build what they called “satellite cities” to accommodate the population they knew would be attracted to the scene
and to keep their capital city from becoming a rural slum before it was ever completed. They hadn’t expected to need these plans so soon.

  “We improvise,” insists Dr. Pinheiro. In a few days they improvised a satellite city which they named Taguatinga.

  Taguatinga was about twenty kilometers outside of the city limits of Brasília. To reach it we bounced over a rough road through a scrubby wilderness where an occasional rhea, the broadbilled South American ostrich, still loped among the termite nests. It certainly didn’t look like a country where a man could live off the land.

  It was exactly a month after the town’s first settlement. We found hundreds of neat little houses ranged along recently staked out streets where watermains were already being laid. A pumping station had tapped what they claimed was an ample supply of water. Electric light was on its way. A moveable clinic in a whitepainted trailer furnished a firstaid station.

  The mayor, a little old man dry and chipper as a cricket, turned out to have been a schoolmate of Dr. Pinheiro’s at Ouro Prêto. He was chosen he told us, because he knew how to get along with working people. He showed us the blueprint of the city in a little office that smelt of raw boards.

  Any settler could occupy a ten by thirty meter lot without down payment, but he had to build a house immediately and within a reasonable time to start paying the five hundred cruzeiros monthly which would earn him title in five years. That was less than four dollars according to the exchange of the time. Many of these refugees from the droughtstricken regions of eastern Brazil and from Bahia and from the baked out towns in the backlands of Minas seemed to have brought a little money with them, enough to buy some building materials. A good many of their houses were brick with tile roofs. Some had one brick wall and the rest of rough boards, to be replaced later, so their owners told us. Perhaps half the settlers lived in shelters of palmettoleaf thatch.