Brazil on the Move (11 page)

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 hills. Drills like gigantic corkscrews were boring for the foundation piling. Here would rise the circular halls for the Senate and House and a pair of tileshaped steel and glass buildings behind to house their offices. These would be balanced by a building for the Supreme Court and another for the executive departments. From there a broad mall with many roadways would run between rows of ministries to the downtown center where the banks and the hotels and the theaters and the department stores were to be established. From this center, “like the wings of a jet plane,” in Lucio Costa’s words, were to stretch in either direction blocks of apartment buildings and private residences. To form the tail of the plane a continuation of the mall would stretch for miles in the direction of the eventual railroad station and the industrial suburbs.

There was not to be a traffic light in the city. Every intersection was to be by overpass or underpass. Unobstructed roadways would feed the traffic into the center of each block where ample parking space was foreseen under the open understories of the buildings. Automobile traffic would come in from the rear. The front of every apartment building or private house was to open on a landscaped square. Shopping centers on the North American suburban plan were to be built within walking distance of each residential block so that the paths for pedestrians would be separate from the automobile roads.

We found ourselves imagining the buildings to be, the great paved spaces, the lawns and gardens, the serried louvers and trellises shading the windows from the sun, the gleaming walls of tile and glass.

“This is the underground bus terminal,” said Dr. Israél, patting a wall of smooth red clay affectionately with his hand. “Escalators will take people up to the great paved central platform above … To the left is the theater and restaurant district … a little Montmartre.”

He bursts into his creaky laugh.

“Of course you think we’re mad. A man has to be a little mad to get anything accomplished in Brazil.”

His quarrel with his American engineers, he began to explain, was that they were not mad enough. They were helpful and practical but they were so accustomed to perfect machinery they had forgotten how to improvise. “In the old days you Americans were the greatest improvisers in the world.” In Brazil everything had to be improvised.

He went on to tell one of his favorite stories. Once when he was running the Rio Doce Company a flood took the piers out from under a steel bridge. Traffic stopped. If the ore stopped going out, the dollars stopped coming in. His American engineers said they could repair the bridge all right but they’d have to wait for a crane to come from the States. That
crane would have taken months even if he’d had the dollars to buy it. Among the work gangs he found a gigantic Negro who said he knew how to get the bridge back on its piers without a crane …

I’d seen the great oxen in the Rio Doce? I nodded. Yes, I’d seen eleven yokes hitched together. How could one forget the great teams of oxen straining forward with the pondered magnificence of a frieze on an early Greek temple?…

Well, he went on excitedly, with a hundred oxen and levers and jacks and winches that illiterate Negro had the bridge open for traffic in nineteen days … “Improvise … that is my answer when people tell me that trying to build a capital out here on the plateau is a crazy project … Central Brazil must have roads, it must have buildings … out of sheer necessity we are improvising Brasília.”

We found that the contagion of Dr. Pinheiro’s enthusiasm had infected the contractors and their engineers and foremen. The place steamed with boomtown excitement. “We all feel ten years younger than when we came,” was how his middle-aged secretary, Dr. Quadros, put it.

Dr. Quadros’ niece, Leonora Quadros, invited us to dinner at her small house out beyond the great compounds of the construction companies that covered the hillside across from the Novacap administration building. She was a handsome young woman of twentyeight. To our amazement we found that she was managing her father’s building materials business.

“That’s not the American idea of a Brazilian girl, now, is it?” she asked with a teasing smile. “In a new city everybody gets a chance.”

“It’s the need to improvise new ways of doing things that keeps us on our toes,” says the young man who was introduced
as Brasília’s oldest inhabitant; he arrived even before they built Dom Bosco’s shrine.

Dom Bosco was an Italian missionary friar who prophesied a great civilization for the central uplands of Brazil. They had taken him for Brasília’s patron saint.

Asked if he intends to stay, the oldest inhabitant nods vigorously: “My life has become Brasília,” he says.

The young people around Leonora Quadros’ table seemed to have enlisted in the building of the city as you might enlist in a military campaign: for the duration. According to them the miracle was that construction had started at all. The city had advanced too far to be abandoned now, they insisted.

An American concern, Raymond Concrete and Pile, was already at work on the dam and the powerplant and the buildings for the eleven ministries. Business interests in São Paulo were vitally engaged. At least five important firms from Rio were involved. In all more than fifty Brazilian concerns were under contract for various phases of the work. A location had been chosen for an American embassy. The steel girders for the congress buildings were already arriving from the States.

Round the table they all talked at once. They showered us with statistics. Already forty thousand people at work. The hotel only took twelve months to complete; the palace, thirteen. In twenty months twelve million cubic feet of earth had been excavated. Two hundred and sixty kilometers of paved roads had been built, and more than six hundred kilometers of dirt roads.

Roads meant settlers. Already the administration of Nova-cap was at its wit’s end to find ways of keeping settlers out before housing could be found for them.

“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.

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.

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.