Brasilia

I’ve been fascinated by Brasilia, the Modernist city designed by Oskar Niemeyer as the administrative capital of Brazil ever since I googled for pictures of the city some years ago when building the Lob website (I’ve used the images all over it). I’d loved to visit the city one day. I’ve just spent the last hour looking at Flickr via the excellent postcard browser (which makes for a much more enjoyable browsing experience than the default one which is slow and obstructive). The above rather gorgeous pics are scavenged from there of course. The Lomo ones are by this photographer.

There’s a wonderful sentence on the Wikipedia page that embodies at least some of that city’s fascination for me:

Costa had insisted that Brasilia be shaped it like a butterfly, but the city is shaped like an airplane instead.

Also this:

One major criticism of Brasília is that it was not designed pedestrian scale … A popular saying is that the inhabitants are born with wheels instead of feet.

Brasilia inspired some of the texts I wrote for the Lob website:

… The landscape appeared to be trying to fall in line with the buildings as they were slowly built. There was something unnatural about this. We longed for an earthquake in a land that didn’t know earthquakes…… The big flag of the new country hangs over us – so many straight lines, parallel like the freeways the foreigners built over our fields…

… We showed him around the red light district. His eyes shone in the light of unsanctioned neons, he stared fascinatedly at the grass growing from the cracks in the concrete blocks of the overpass…

I’d love to visit Brasilia one day. I’d also love to write a novel with Brasilia as a backdrop, something with shades of Ballard probably. What will its story be?