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Brasilia and the Burial of Utopia: THE

MODERNIST CITY: An
Anthropological Critique of Brasilia by
James Holston (University of Chicago
Press: $50, cloth; $18.95, paper; 432 pp.,
illustrated; 0-226-34978-0)
March 04, 1990|Peter Hall | Hall, who teaches city planning at Berkeley, is author of
"Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the
Twentieth Century" (Blackwell)

The academic publishing world seems awash with books about postmodernism. Not
only architectural critics--geographers and sociologists and general historical
doomsayers also are banding to make it the hot topic of early 1990.

Many of their readers may find themselves more bemused at the end than when they
started. For postmodernism seems to have become a kind of code word for everything
these authors dislike in contemporary capitalism but cannot quite elucidate.

At least two hurrahs, therefore, for James Holston. An assistant professor at the
University of Southern California, he utters the P-word only in his last couple of pages.
His subject matter is at first sight specialized, even obscure: the creation in the late
1950s of the new Brazilian capital, in the empty plains about 600 miles from Rio de
Janeiro. But, by dissecting the phenomenon that postmodernism supplanted, he
indirectly illuminates the subject far more satisfactorily than any of his competitors so
far.

Holston comes unusually well qualified, with a degree in both architecture and
anthropology, so he can analyze Brasilia, as an architectural project, from the standpoint
and with the techniques of an anthropologist. He argues that modernism--the
architectural movement that began with Le Corbusier, Gropius and all the other heroes
of the 1920s, culminated in the Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne
(CIAM) in the 1930s, and effectively ended with the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe
project in St. Louis in 1972--had a very radical social and political intent: It was a
project to replace capitalism by a new collectivist social order.

This, oddly, could happen under very different political regimes: It was true alike in the
Soviet Union and in Fascist Italy in the 1920s, and (though he does not say this) in
Social-Democratic Stockholm and London in the 1950s. It is also specifically true in
Brasilia. Though President Juscelino Kubitschek, the city's godfather, was a Latin
American populist, the true begetter of the Brasilia plan was Oscar Niemeyer, doyen of
Brazilian architects and an avowed Communist. He persuaded the competition jury to
accept the plan of his teacher Lucio Costa, written on five index cards.
This plan, according to Holston, was the ultimate political achievement of the modern
movement, "a CIAM city . . . the most complete example ever constructed of the
architectural and planning tenets put forward in CIAM manifestoes"; it achieved the
objective for which the pioneers of the modern movement had struggled in vain. Its
hidden agenda was to create a totally new-built form as a shell for a new society,
without reference to history: The past was simply to be abolished. "Brasilia," he writes,
"was built to be more than the symbol of this new age. Rather, its design and
construction were intended as a means to create it by transforming Brazilian society."

Brasilia thus embodied a fundamental premise of the modern movement: "total


decontextualization," in which a utopian future becomes the means to measure the
present, without any sense of historical context. Costa introduces his plan, in
disarmingly self-effacing fashion, as the carrier of a mythic idea that came to him
almost as a vision: It provides a basis for a city created on a clean slate, without
reference to the past.

Specifically, in this new city the traditional, heavily stratified Brazilian society would
be replaced by a totally egalitarian one: In the uniform apartment blocks, governors and
ambassadors would live as neighbors with janitors and laborers. The apartments marked
a radical break with class-conscious tradition: Masters and servants would use the same
entrances, even share the same spaces.

The traditional divisions between public and private space would be abolished; these
blocks would be machines for collective public living. And the traditional street--the
age-old essence of the division between public and private life--must likewise
disappear; hence Brasilia's eight-lane expressways, which act as social divisors rather
than social integrators.

On this hidden agenda of modernism, Holston is extraordinarily persuasive. He


illuminates, in a depth and with a subtlety no architectural critic ever has achieved, just
what the true program of the modern architectural movement was. Why high-rise
structures with curtain walls of glass? To erode the private life of the family, and
collectivize the children down in the communal play spaces and creches. Why vast
expressways and shopping centers? To emphasize the death of the street, and with it the
subtle relationships between public and private space.

The aim was indeed radical, even subversive: "to restructure the institutional
relationships between the public and the private domains of social life so that they are
both entirely regulated by a comprehensive, state-sponsored master plan," thus
transforming the structure of capitalist society by stealth. Small wonder that modernism
came into its own only in totalitarian regimes, or in municipal collectivist local states.

But in Brasilia, it could not work. The deep class structures of Brazil, subtly racial in
origin, reasserted themselves. The manual workers who built the city, and were
temporarily glorified as heroes, were banished from it; after epic fights, they were
allowed to remain in distant satellite towns, totally segregated from middle-class
Brasilian society, spending much of their meager salaries on long commutes.

The servants who remained in the superblocks, ironically, were cooped up in closet
spaces far worse than the rooms they had enjoyed in traditional apartments. Some of
this story has been told, and told well, in previous accounts of Brasilia. But Holston
invests it, too, with new layers of meaning.

What is its significance for the project of postmodernism? Here, at the very end,
Holston is tantalizingly and disappointingly laconic. Radical postmodernists argue that
the new aesthetic requires a total social revolution for its achievement: an irony, since
modernism itself tried to engineer just such a revolution through the effect of built
forms on the psyche. Conservative postmodernists, led by Prince Charles, conversely
call for a return to preindustrial-built forms. Both, Holston argues, are utopian: Either
they ignore their own historical context, or, worse, they exacerbate the problems they
purport to solve. And so, ironically, they fall into the same trap as the modernists before
them.

That may be oversimplistic, a quality certainly not found elsewhere in this book. (If
there is a criticism, it is that the style is often too academically inflated, too prolix and
unnecessarily complex; qualities that doubtless reflect the book's origin as a Ph.D.
dissertation.) Modernism's demise surely reflects a complex counter-reaction from a
number of disparate forces: bored young architects seeking something new, angry
tenants of public-housing projects revolting against the collectivist violence done on
them, and, more subtly, a new Zeitgeist that elevates the whimsical and the ironic and
the transient above the solid and the serious.

Certainly, the exposure of modernism's failings in practice--especially through the


serious media--played a critical role. But there was more to it than that. Perhaps,
unconsciously, people came to appreciate the hidden agenda.

Whatever the cause, the triumph of postmodernism is surely an integral part of a huge
political sea-change, marked also by the triumph of Thatcho-Reaganism and the
toppling of collectivism in Eastern Europe.

There is much more to be written on it; Holston's next book, maybe.

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