Rioters being channelled up a ramp on the National Congress building in Brasilia. Photo / Getty Images
Rioters being channelled up a ramp on the National Congress building in Brasilia. Photo / Getty Images
When rioters stormed the Brazilian capital Brasilia on January 8 this year, the echoes of the January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol in Washington DC were clear. It was the same, but it was also different.
Same, because outraged supporters of a populist demagogue were attempting a coup, apparently with the demagogue’s support.
Different, because the architecture and urban design of Brasilia made it a different protest from the one in Washington.
Brasilia was built only 60 years ago. Like Washington - and like Canberra - it is a city created for the purpose of being the capital.
They started with a very big idea: to create an urban utopia. Planner Lucio Costa created a vast open plain in the form of a cross, called the Eixo Monumental, or Monumental Axis, with buildings around it designed by the architect Oscar Niemeyer. Those buildings are modernist in their lack of ornamentation and futurist in their scale and sweeping, uplifting curves. Each stands in isolation from the others.
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Costa and Niemeyer were socialists. Instead of mansions and favelas, they built apartment “superblocks” that would house everyone and minimise class difference. They wanted the empty spaces and monumentalism of their public buildings to connect citizens to the great democratic future of the nation.
Viewed from the air, the axis is supposed to evoke not only a Christian cross, but a bird in flight and an aeroplane. Religion, nature and technology, symbolically united as one.
Vandalised statue outside the Supreme Court in Brasilia. Photo / Getty Images
In 1956, one writer declared Brasilia would be “the prototype for cities of tomorrow”, showing everyone “how we must congregate and live together as humans of the atomic age”.
That’s not what happened. Most residents live in satellite towns far from the centre. Many politicians have kept their mansions and fly in when they need to. Most of the time, the city feels empty. Rather than expressing a humanist ideal, Brasilia makes people feel puny.
Repressive governments on the right have been fine with this, while Brazil’s less common left-wing governments have had poverty and other problems to worry about. So nothing has changed.
Ironically, though, when the anti-democratic rioters turned up in January, Brasilia’s inhuman scale and design conspired against them.
As indigenous rights and worker protests have found in the past, making your way across that enormous axis is alienating and dispiriting.
And when the mob did finally get to the government buildings, there was no climbing the balustrades and forcing their way in through narrow windows and doors, as happened at the neoclassically designed Capitol. The Brazilian Congress has blank facades and long curved ramps to march up: the building deflated some of the rioters’ anger by organising them to shuffle along those ramps.
And Congress was in recess, so when they did smash their way in, no one was there. In the big empty spaces, there was nothing for the mob to do.
Brasilia is beautiful but barren. Its aesthetics idealism doesn’t make people better citizens, but oddly, it did help defend democracy.
