

Brasília: an excerpt from Urbanized - harrybr
http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2012/11/05/brazillia-an-excerpt-from-urbanized/

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diego_moita
Oscar Niemeyer is a glorified disaster in usability; his buildings are the
most wonderful and unusable crap.

I worked for 3 months in a building that is now a museum to his creations:
[http://www.cliquearquitetura.com.br/portal/blog/view/mon-
mus...](http://www.cliquearquitetura.com.br/portal/blog/view/mon-museu-oscar-
niemeyer-curitiba/216) It basically looks like the scenery from "The Jetsons"
cartoons/series. It is cool from the outside but is an horrible place to be
inside the whole day.

It's official name was "Castelo Branco" (white castle) but everyone called it
"white elephant".

What made it beautiful is that it looks like a white slab floating over a
field with a rain forest park behind. What made it atrocious is that the thing
had no windows or ventilation, bad water drainage and it is in the middle of
the rain forest region: hot, humid and moldy; the perfect breeding place for
respiratory diseases. Most people would work very little time there before
leaving to treat allergies, flu, pneumonia and even tuberculosis.

~~~
malandrew
Like the article mentioned, Brasilia is a glorified disaster in usability for
everyone except those in cars. It's terrible for humans on foot or on
bicycles. However the biggest travesty was the decision to locate the city in
an area that has a 10-15% relative humidity during the winter months (May to
September). It is so dry that your eyes and throat will be very dry, scratchy
and uncomfortable and your lips will become chapped. Some people even
experience nosebleeds from the excessive dryness.

The other problem with Brasilia is the 99%er problem. The city was built by
the 99% for the 1%. All the 99%ers ended up in the slummy satellite cities,
where the quality of life is low and where there hasn't been any real sources
of economic activity to raise the quality of life.

~~~
dguaraglia
Also, important to remember, Brasilia is in the middle of no-fucking-where. I
remember when my - then - wife wanted to get a tourism visa to the US you had
two options: go to São Paulo, or Brasilia. Brasilia had half the waiting time,
but for us living in Santa Catarina it was simply a no-go.

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johncoltrane
That's Brasília. With an S and an accent on the i that follows.

Niemeyer is not responsible for the urban planning of Brasília, someone else
did. His role was to design some of its most prominent individual elements and
ensure a visual language throughout the whole project.

The crazy urban planning was the work of Lúcio Costa (thanks Wikipedia): why
not using a quote by him, instead?

Pitting urbanists against architects is just as futile as pitting Android
fanboys against iOS fanboys.

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incision
FYI - The film referenced, Urbanized, is available for streaming on Netflix. I
watched it a few weeks back and thoroughly enjoyed it even though I'm not
particularly versed or overly interested in the subject.

~~~
danso
I came here just to post that it was on Netflix streaming:
[http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Urbanized/70218731?locale=...](http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Urbanized/70218731?locale=en-
US)

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binarymax
If anyone is interested in seeing a city design by a single visionary that
does work, I highly recommend checking out Yerevan Armenia - a project headed
by Alexander Tamanyan 85 years ago - that is in parts still being implemented.

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RyanMcGreal
It looks like Le Corbusier finally found an entire city willing to incorporate
his design values. What a fiasco.

~~~
brudgers
Try to reach Seaside without a car.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
So our only urban design choices are the Tower in a Park or the New Urbanist
suburb?

~~~
brudgers
Brasilia is a modernist city forged out of wilderness. It attempts to deal
with the messy problems of poverty.

BTW, Seaside isn't a suburb of anything.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
I'm still trying to understand what you're arguing.

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biot
The title appears to have been editorialized from the actual one: "Brasília:
an excerpt from Urbanized". As the submitter is the site's owner, perhaps the
altered title was thought to appeal more to HN? I was hoping to read about
some interesting concepts that emerged from using Photoshop at the wrong zoom
level.

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brudgers
Jan Gehl is no Oscar Niemeyer.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Niemeyer>

The Netherlands has twenty times the density and four times the per capita
income. Brazil is vast. It is nearly as far from Brasilia to Natal as from
Amsterdam to Moscow.

Rational urbanism isn't one size fits all.

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zerostar07
Understandably the urban planners did not anticipate that technology would
make us less dependent on cars instead of more. I assume linear regression is
what contemporary planners use as well. I wonder what are the main concerns
taken into account when planning for rapidly growin urban cities in Asia for
example, and how they will turn out to be in 50 years

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danso
I wish there were more concrete examples (and diagrams) of how things at "eye
level" didn't work in Brasília. Is it just the straight, too-far paths to each
landmark? Is there a lack of connecting bridges across the freeways?

Also, a little more exploration of how this applies to web and app design
would be interesting. It seems that the lessons from Brasília would be
inverted: thinking too much of the small details and not of the broad visual
scope (especially across pages). It doesn't seem like too many designers get
hung up on designing for a far-out zoom level, since you learn pretty early
that you have limited screen space to work with.

~~~
Spooky23
If you're ever in upstate NY, check out the Empire State Plaza in Albany (
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_State_Plaza> ), which is a massive
complex of government buildings designed with similar principles to the
government core of Brasilia.

They basically gutted the core of the city and built a million square feet of
office space, connected by massive underground concourses, mazes of tunnels,
and an outdoor concourse that resembles a Roman forum scaled for giant robots.

I think that one of the design principles was that senior bureaucrats would
never need to be exposed to outdoor air or the city they work in the middle
of. Hit the garage door opener, roll into your underground parking garage, and
stroll through the corridors to your office.

It's literally a fifteen minute walk to get to a coffee shop on the street
outside of the complex.

~~~
mturmon
Thanks for that link.

The style of the "Cultural Education Center" there reminds me of the Dorothy
Chandler Pavilion in LA (early 1960s) -- monumental architecture on an
elevated stone plaza, with a fountain and sculpture in front and parking
beneath. It was also designed at the behest of a rich old cultural icon
(Rockefeller in Albany, Dorothy "Buffy" Chandler in LA).

As you point out, one of the problems of this architectural style is that the
resulting building is totally disconnected from the surrounding streetscape.
It took decades for the area around the Chandler Pavilion in LA to gain back
some significant buildings that had a relation to the street.

It turns out it's actually a net minus for the area if the people going to the
building just park underneath, go up, do their business, and exit. The
resulting bubble creates an obstacle for organic development nearby.

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ArekDymalski
That's true for many areas. I've experienced the same during my adventures
with music production.

~~~
Gring
Could you explain more?

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Buzaga
I live in this crap! hahaha

anyway, it's true, it's a 'beautiful city', but the 'UX' is horrible, people
from much bigger cities likes São Paulo or Rio arrive here and feel like
everything is way too far away(even tho you could fit 10 Brasílias inside São
Paulo), also, apparently it was made for cars to move through, not people

Me and my friends theorize how this, and other architectural decisions, like
the way the city is heavily location/class segregated(specially considering
it's the city with the worst case of income concentration of Brazil) affects
the people here, they're not as welcoming as they are in other cities we went,
in our opinion

~~~
brudgers
Brasilia was indeed designed based on automotive travel following Corbusian
urban design principals.

These principles were developed in response to the conditions found in the
world's slums using a central planning concept. Gehl's approach came about a
generation later (in the U.S. Jane Jacob's _Life and Death of American Cities
was a response to the centralized approach to improving urban spaces).

Both Gehl's and Jacobs may be criticized for failing to address the horrible
conditions to which Brasilia (and the CIAM modernists) were responding. 1960's
Greenwich Village and Holland don't replicate the conditions of Brazil's
_favelas*.

