EXCERPT

From the Introduction, by Farès el-Dahdah

Among a list of questions submitted by a journalist to Lucio Costa before an interview, one sought to identify Costa’s most important achievement in Brasilia. In his usual squiggly penmanship, Costa responded: “the superquadra.” This answer is somewhat unexpected—a repeatable housing scheme is rarely the architectural program on which an architect banks the lasting import of his work. Such a preference, however, reflects the fact that although Costa’s project for Brasilia is best known for the grandeur of its Monumental Axis, its living conditions can more accurately be judged along the other axis, a 12-kilometer highway lined with rows of large residential blocks, commonly referred to as superquadras. To have chosen the superquadra as most reflective of his achievements may also represent an attempt by Costa to counter the habitual critique leveled against Brasilia in general and against such a housing typology in particular.

Judging from the press Brasilia received since its creation in 1957, the complex of residential buildings known as the superquadra has always been identified with the presumed failure of Brazil’s new capital. Aside from the pejorative terms frequently employed to describe it (monotonous, rigid, etc.), the superquadra has often—directly or indirectly—been accused of having produced a space in which individuals are alienated, oppressed, or subject to some form of spatial segregation. Such accusations always seem based on a series of misreadings, whether due to the misleading agency of 1960s black-and-white photographs, which portray Brasilia as an arid landscape punctuated by white volumes, or to a 1980s postmodern bias that seeks to blame architecture and architects for failed housing projects.
Positions taken against Brasilia date in fact to the day Lucio Costa won the national design competition for the new capital of Brazil. Among those who lost the competition, one architect accused the winning entry of inadmissible academicism: "I do not believe that a capital should be a pantheon…. I cannot accept this nineteenth-century concept of 'monumentality'." Costa, for whom ideological biases of any kind are to be avoided, replied a few days later that "in reference to the concept of monumentality, I do not see why in a democracy a city must necessarily be devoid of grandeur." The project of Brasilia as a whole has often been viewed as the exemplar of all that is wrong with modern architecture’s urbanism, even though almost a half century later, the city, by all accounts, continues to thrive.