Foreign architectures in Brasilia. Le Corbusier, A&P Smithson and Scharoun in the modern South American landscape

Abstract

Brasilia supports its urban design on the architectural quality of its buildings, fact that is always relevant to citizens in order to defend the value of their modern arcadia. There is a modern architecture for a modern urbanism. Here, we will approach the architecture projected for Brasilia by foreign architects, who contributed to increase the heritage in the landscape, the urban development and the architecture founded by Roberto Burle-Marx, Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, promoting the idea that, at least the Plano Piloto, would be designed by exceptional creators. The study of these projects, named the embassies of three European world powers and cradles of the modern universal movement, allows the simultaneous analysis of the modern movement’s evolution, including its depoliticizing that meant the jump to the American continent in the post-war period. This coincidence that is spatial, temporary and programmatically of three generations of modern masters (Costa and Niemeyer included), is the only case in South-America, comparable to the European experiences like it Hansa’s Berlin neighbourhood, headquarters of the Interbau of 1957, or the experimental neighbourhood Weissenhof in Stuttgart, made almost half century before, in 1927. 

Key words: embassies, landscape architecture, modernity, brutalism,
Le Corbusier, Smithson, Scharoun, Burle-Marx.