Roberto picked me up from my hotel in his Ford Fusion to start our tour. Yes, even though 90% of Brasilia’s famous sights are on the main street of the city, a car tour was the only way to go about seeing them all in one day. Like I’ve said before, not walker friendly.
Roberto was a great sport, expertly answering my rapid-fire questions about the city. He had lived here most of his life, so he had a lot of insight about the changes the city had seen in the previous decades. He explained something that I had actually thought a lot about-why there was no one downtown. When the city was built, all of the housing downtown was made for families. This entailed 4 or 5 person apartments. But that was 50 years ago and demographics have changed as children moved out and spouses passed away. I talked to a landlady who said that exactly 30 of her 60 units were occupied by single widowers. Meanwhile, the rent remains too sky high so young couples are moving out to the areas around the city, and the wealthier ambassadors and expats have moved to the neighborhood of South Lake. Downtown numbers are dwindling, a problem for the city’s design (that I’ll get into at a later post).
While not directly tied into my venture grant exploration, the buildings were what this city was built around. A utopian ideal of great architecture and monuments accessible to all. The monuments followed the city theme of “empty”, perhaps through the photo you can tell how astonishingly…well, empty, these places where. For instance, at the Palácio da Alvorada (Brasilia’s equivalent of the White House), I was one of 4 or 5 people there. I did find it pretty funny that, instead of a fence, they had a “moat” (I would call it more a shallow carp pond-compete with carp!-that a high school long jumper could easily hop across).
[On a related note, Roberto told me that, when asked the best time to visit Brasilia, Oscar Niemeyer responded, “Weekends, so there are no cars in front of the monuments.”]
For lunch, Roberto took me to get ‘real Brazilian pizza’ and mate, where I encountered the most people I had seen at once this trip. There were probably 5 or 6 guys eating at the counter silently watching the Brazil-South Africa soccer match. Brazil won.
One of the happiest coincidences of the days was that the National Museum (the circular building with a curving ramp sticking out of the side) was having an art exhibit on the Bauhaus movement! Ah, ‘twas a good day to be an architecture nerd in Brazil.
While the buildings didn’t disappoint, they did look…worn. White isn’t an ideal or sustainable building color. That being said, a lot of these photos are in black and white because these buildings are so much more about their form or shape, and to have the grimy concrete color in front of the building distract from the photo would kind of be a shame. Black and white really shows off the clean lines. I will say that the photos I had seen previously (and took myself) of the Dom Bosco Church (the one with all the small square panels of blue stained glass) did/do not nearly do it justice.
-Ellie
