Brasilia: Seat Of Power

We drove past the Army headquarters at the end of our morning tour of the city, past the courts where insurrectionists from January 8th 2023 are being tried for attempting to overthrow the government and plotting the assassination of the winner of the election.

Supporters of the losing candidate, Jair Bolsonaro attacked parliament and trashed the place but the military refused to join the coup attempt and President Lula was installed in his place. Bolsonaro is in prison in Brasilia serving a 27 year term, he’s 70 so unless he gets an amnesty it’s a life term. His followers are in court facing a similar outcome. 

There is a weird role reversal taking place in the Americas as elections recently have installed a selection of conservative leaders in Brazil Bolivia Argentina Ecuador and Chile and all managed peacefully without drama. I watch the threats against Colombia and Venezuela and shake my head. 

If Brazil’s Federal  parliament building reminds you of the United Nations building in New York it’s because the same architect is responsible for both, though Oscar Niemeyer was merely a prominent voice in the committee in New York and the lead architect in the creation of Brasilia.

The House of Representatives is represented by the upturned bowl on the left while the senate chamber is under the bowl on the right, supposed to be the representation of the yin and yang of the two chambers.  And that was as close as we were allowed to get at the moment. The insurrection also ended tours of the Dawn Palace, the residence of the President. 

From behind the security fence it’s possible to see the half wings in the front of the building, a motif repeated in various public structures in the city, notably the office of the president. 

According to our guide Alberto who drove us round the city, plans were laid in the 1870s to build a capital city somewhere in Brazil, but the idea languished for generations. Rio de Janeiro jealously guarded its role as capital. 

Until J K was elected President in 1956, that is to say Juscelino Kubitschek Oliveira. His mother was of Czech and Gypsy descent and she raised her boy as her husband died when Juscelino was two years old. 

JK created the city employing 60,000 people to build a whole new capital reviving the long dormant plans for a city to be built in the plains in the center of the country.  It was a controversial decision contested by power brokers in Rio de Janeiro but JK prevailed getting the city built, not necessarily completed, in one term in office starting in 1956. He figured if it wasn’t done in one term his successor could overturn the plan so it was built frenetically fast. And the first building was the Presidential palace. 

Juscelino Kubitschek 1902-1976

He died in a car accident but his initials are all over Brasilia. Including on the JK road bridge spanning Lake Paranoá.

The second building was the hotel built to house the leaders of the construction:

Oscar Niemeyer had his own vision of how things should be built and I discovered he employed whimsy and imagination but to practical ends as well. His cathedral is an example and it’s unlike any church you’ve ever seen.

To me it looks like segmented orange but it’s supposedly a crown. The bell tower is a chalice. 

And the baptismal font is a chamber inside a host which is undergoing renovation and is not open for tours at the moment: 

The church is surrounded by a moat, a design feature to help cool the interior by passing air over the water to ventilate the interior which is underground. You well down a ramp to enter the cathedral. 

I have never seen anything like it, as once inside you stand under a vast glass dome:

With angels flying around overhead. 

Niemeyer also designed peculiar acoustics into the building such that you can stand at the wall, a compound curve and talk in a normal voice to a listener half way round the church. Christelle in the distance talking to Alberto our guide: 

Confessionals as unconventional as anything in here:

The stations of the cross as artwork in one spot:

Outside you also have the authors of the four gospels: 

And some souvenir stalls.

We got a fridge magnet for GANNET2, with in the distance the twin towers of the parliament building.  

In the other direction on this vast open space you can see the city more or less downtown with the art museum, a white dome, in the foreground. 

The city which has no formal downtown as we shall see: 

And a Christmas fair which opens this week which we plan to visit later one evening:

In Spanish Christmas is “Navidad” but in Portuguese it is “Natal” much closer to Italian oddly enough. 

You can also see the various government ministries in their tower blocks lining the vast avenue.

Above the slogan reads: “We have cut destruction of the Amazon by half” touting efforts to preserve the rain forest. 

Under the conservative Jair Bolsonaro ministries were cut to two dozen but his successor leftist Lula da Silva has increased them to three dozen. 

As you can see I hope, the presidency, the parliament, government offices, and the courts are all centered more or less in one spot within walking distance of each other with the cathedral, the art museum and the National Library also parked right next to the seat of power. And all inside these slightly strange cement structures from the mind of Niemeyer and his committee planning it all in the 1960s and built in the space of four years, one presidential term. Tomorrow I’ll show you the extraordinary urban planning of the residential area of central Brasilia but today I’ll show you the art museum which has free access to everyone. 

The classic Niemeyer access ramp: 

It was an architecture tour introducing  us to the buildings more than a visit to see the exhibits which we plan to return to check out on our own. 

You may notice the main exhibit at the moment is a display of indigenous art…

The mezzanine hanging from the ceiling: 

Alberto, our guide, a native of the city and the Federal District. 

Another Niemeyer ramp to get to the hanging mezzanine: 

It’s pretty amazing what you get when you give an artist some land, carte blanche and money to get it done. 

The national library:

Parliamentary offices next to the parliament building:

The army headquarters: 

The army theater and conference center: 

Officer graduations are held under this arch/dome construction: 

This is all the seat of power of the largest  country in south America and the tenth largest economy in the world.

The criminal court: 

Sloganeering: “No taxes for those earning less than a thousand dollars a year.”  

The national stadium seating 72,000 people, a quarter of the city’s population:

Christelle, formerly of Key West, a teacher, photographing her own memories. 

I can’t remember if this is the national theater or the Supreme Court or something else: 

The Attorney General’s office:

Parliament: 

The foreign ministry:

Brasilia: 

Oscar Ribeiro de Almeida Niemeyer Soares Filho (15 December 1907 – 5 December 2012), known as Oscar Niemeyer(Brazilian Portuguese: [ˈoskaʁni.eˈmajeʁ]), was a Brazilian architect considered to be one of the key figures in the development of modern architecture. Niemeyer was best known for his design of civic buildings for Brasília, a planned city that became Brazil's capital in 1960, as well as his collaboration with other architects on the headquarters of the United Nations in New York. His exploration of the aesthetic possibilities of reinforced concretewas highly influential in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Both lauded and criticized for being a "sculptor of monuments",^[1] Niemeyer was hailed as a great artist and one of the greatest architects of his generation by his supporters.^[2] He said his architecture was strongly influenced by Le Corbusier, but in an interview, assured that this "didn't prevent [his] architecture from going in a different direction".^[3] Niemeyer was most famous for his use of abstract forms and curves and wrote in his memoirs:

I am not attracted to straight angles or to the straight line, hard and inflexible, created by man. I am attracted to free-flowing, sensual curves. The curves that I find in the mountains of my country, in the sinuousness of its rivers, in the waves of the ocean, and on the body of the beloved woman. Curves make up the entire Universe, the curved Universe of Einstein.^[4]

 From  Wikipedia  

Died in 2012, and buried here. Alberto said even his minute this controversial as it reminds some of the communist sickle: