Brasilia: reason as an enemy

100 Years of Oscar Niemeyer Life with a Double Brasilia: Reason as an Enemy Sartre, Marx and the Mask of Optimism realization: Headquarters of the French Communist Party (1972)

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I must confess that by the time I started working for the city of Brasilia, I was already tired of constantly explaining myself. I knew I had enough experience that I didn’t need to defend my work continually. Therefore, I hardly cared about the inevitable criticism that my designs would undoubtedly provoke.

Just as during the time of the Pampulha projects, in Brasilia I was also seized by a feeling of protest. This time, I was no longer troubled by the burden of the right angle, but rather by the obsession with architectural purity and the logic of construction, a systematic campaign waged against the free and creative forms that attracted me and were disdainfully regarded as arbitrary and unnecessary. People spoke of "purism," "machines for living," "less is more," "functionalism," and so on—without realizing that all of this would become secondary if the path to plastic freedom offered by reinforced concrete were opened. Contemporary architecture was drowning in repetitive glass boxes.

I imagined that the proponents of contemporary architecture, weary of so much repetition, would one day be disappointed by the dogmas they once vigorously defended and would choose something new, finally assured that invention must triumph. This is happening today; however, architects are once again making a mistake—they automatically follow postmodernism, copying buildings supplemented merely with anachronistic or old-fashioned details. It is the same "arbitrariness" they once criticized and now embraced in its most superficial form.

With sadness, I remember how— even after the construction framework was completed—the architectural form essential for the completion of the building often remained unclear; nothing was known about it except that it would come later, as a secondary consideration. This was a result of introducing a deceptive technical rigor that purist authors accepted with their mediocre buildings. In my view, it was the task of architects to anticipate construction problems; by linking imagination with technical knowledge, they could create an architectural spectacle in line with contemporary currents of thought.

In the case of buildings for the city of Brasilia, I decided to pursue exactly this line of thought. Their characteristic was to be an innovative construction form. As a result, insignificant details typical of rationalist architecture would give way to the dominant presence of new forms. Anyone who examines the complex of the National Congress buildings and the Palace of Brasilia will immediately notice that even at the moment their construction framework was completed, the architectural concept was already present.

I experimented with reinforced concrete, particularly with supports that tapered into very slender tips, into elements so slender that the palaces seemingly barely touched the ground. I remember how joyfully I drew the columns of the presidential residence—the Palace of Alvorada—and the pleasure when I later saw my idea copied everywhere. The columns created a kind of surprise, contrasting with the otherwise prevailing monotony. With the same zeal, I worked on the presidential office building, the Palace of Planalto, and on the construction of the Supreme Federal Court at Praca dos Tres Poderes. I pulled the columns forward from the facade, and standing before the drawings, I tried to imagine myself walking among them and determining what angles they would form. This exercise led me to reject the simple, functional support the building required, and instead, I deliberately preferred a completely new shape. All the while, I laughed at that "mistake," which, hopefully, soon prevailing average critics will discover with my "double." Yet nothing stopped them, and they were not even curious. Had they been curious, had they even been a little more learned and knew, for example, the following words of Heidegger, it would have benefited them: "Reason is the enemy of imagination."

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Excerpt from the book The Curves of Times: The memoirs of Oscar Niemeyer, Phaidon London 2000, pp. 171-173
(translation and title by Kateřina Lopatová)