WHAT'S DOING IN
WHAT'S DOING IN; BRASILIA
By Alan Riding; ALAN RIDING is chief of the Rio de Janeiro bureau of The Times.
Published: March 30, 1986
Laid out with precision beside an artificial lake on a green landscaped plain, engulfed by distant horizons and a vast, always changing sky, Brasilia is a monument to dreams -the generations-old dream of moving Brazil's capital inland and the dream of President Juscelino Kubitschek to build a city in just three years. On April 21, 1960, when the capital was moved from Rio de Janeiro to Brasilia, both dreams were fulfilled.
Today Brasilia is alive with new dreams. Having served for 21 of its 26 years as headquarters of a military regime, it is now blossoming into the political center of a democratic country. The three aging fathers of Brasilia - the urban planner, Lucio Costa, 84; the architect, Oscar Niemeyer, 78, and the landscape artist, Roberto Burle Marx, 76 - have been called in to repair damage to their designs caused by the succession of military regimes, and moves are afoot to provide the culture, entertainment, urban life and sense of identity that a 26-year-old city with 1.6 million inhabitants deserves.
For visitors, the draw of Brasilia is not its night spots or restaurants or theaters - at least, not in the foreseeable future. Rather, most tourists come out of curiosity. Some find the broad avenues and modernistic edifices daringly majestic; others consider Brasilia so overplanned as to be inhospitable, yet they seize the opportunity to see a 21st-century city in 1986. Contrasts The contrast between rulers and ruled may help explain Brasilia. The rulers - bureaucrats and politicians - tend to live in Brasilia proper, the carefully sculptured area referred to as the Pilot Plan. The ruled - those in the construction and service industries - live 10 to 20 miles away in a dozen satellite towns where housing, health and education services are often inadequate.
Both groups are made up of migrants, with more and more of their children born here. But while most of the rulers come from the more developed south of the country and frequently visit their families in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo or Belo Horizonte, the majority of the ruled come from the impoverished northeast and rarely return to their original homes to visit. As a result, Brasilia's emerging character - seen through its fiestas, handcrafts, manners and dialect - is increasingly being shaped by northeasterners. Sightseeing A map is the best place to start, so that Brasilia's dramatic airplane shape can be understood. Its fuselage, with the country's center of power placed in the cockpit, contains government buildings, banks, offices and hotels, while endless blocks of apartments and occasional shopping areas - known as superquadras and identified by letters and numbers -fill its two sweeping wings.
Visitors soon discover that Brasilia was not built for pedestrians. They have the choice of hiring a taxi - the rate should be negotiated but should not exceed $8 an hour - or taking a three-hour guided tour (about $10 a person) on a bus that passes most hotels around 9 A.M. and 2 P.M. every day. Advise your reception desk that you'd like to take the tour.
For the do-it-yourself visitor, the best place to start is the Kubitschek Monument, known as the Memorial JK (open daily from 9 A.M. to noon, entry fee 30 cents). It not only contains the tomb of the city's founder but also a museum with a record of the dreams and adventures that preceded Brasilia's creation.
Moving down the fuselage, visitors should stop next at the television tower, which has an observation deck 250 feet above the ground where, with map in hand, they can survey the city.
Eyes focus immediately on the broad Esplanade of the Ministries. On one side stands the round National Cathedral, with its 16 arched columns sweeping upward to form the spikes of a crown of thorns. As unusual as it is, it should soon be even more impressive after stained-glass windows are installed. The National Theater, decorated on one side with a huge sculpture of cubes, stands across a wide stretch of green.
The ministry buildings lining the avenue are all identical, more functional than interesting. But they were probably so designed to heighten the contrast to those that lie beyond: the beautiful Justice Ministry, with waterfalls springing from its facade, and, opposite, the elegant Foreign Ministry in Itamarati Palace and then the huge Plaza of Three Powers, lined with the towers and convex and concave bowls of Congress, the President's Planalto Palace and the Supreme Court.
The huge flagpole that almost dominates the square was a nationalist symbol erected by a past military regime. Concluding that it would be too expensive to dismantle the flagpole, the new civilian government asked Mr. Niemeyer to design a Pantheon of Liberty, a monument containing the engraved names of the country's heroes, for the fourth side of the plaza. The monument will be unveiled on April 21, the anniversary of the death of Tancredo Neves, the president-elect who died last year without taking office. Even then Brasilia will not be completed - a National Library, National Archives and National Museum all have sites but no budget.