With:
Lúcio Costa
Oscar Niemeyer
Roberto Burle Marx
Exactly forty years ago, Brasília, Brazil’s new capital, was inaugurated after an extremely short construction period of barely four years. Brasília was designed jointly by Brazilian urban planners and architects Lúcio Costa (1902-1998) and Oscar Niemeyer (b.1907) and landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994). It is one of the few realised ideal cities of the 20th century – a constructed utopia that must be understood today in the context of the time when it was created: as a radical implementation of the Athens Charter, set in the middle of the undeveloped Brazilian interior, the city is a unique manifesto of modernism in Brazil. The exhibition presents the city plan or “Costas Piano Piloto” and Oscar Niemeyer’s most important buildings as a complete model of Brasília shown for the first time in Germany. Current photographs, video documentations and original plans by Burle Marx as well as loans from Brazilian private collections are also on view.
