Plano Piloto (2014)
Brasilia is a city that isn’t a city. At least, it doesn’t feel like one.
Designed on the drawing board and built in less than four years, Brazil’s capital represents one of the most ambitious attempts in history to create the perfect functional city with precisely outlined quarters for work, life, and pleasure. A city shaped like a bird with wings for living and a body for culture, commerce, and administration. The latter is housed on the vertical axis, while residential areas are organized by rows of neighborhood units spanning along a 12-km highway. Each block, commonly referred to as 'superquadras', is a perfect little cosmos for itself with shared commercial and institutional facilities in which gates, fences, and inaccessible areas are hard to find. All with the intention of giving residents a feeling of total freedom and security.
In reality, Brasilia can feel overwhelming, out-of-scale, otherworldly, like a strange fever dream only the most gifted novelists could have imagined. It lacks most of what is ordinarily associated with urban life—vibrant streets, small corner shops, and people who fill the nightly streets with chatter and broken glass. It’s a space whose creation was driven by human ambition for productivity and perfection. The series is a meditation on the wonders and strangeness one experiences when wandering the remains of a utopian dream that once envisioned the future but today has to face the struggles of our shared present.
