Oscar Niemeyer: The Capital That Put Its Architect on Trial

On an empty plateau at the heart of Brazil, a land that has heard many human promises, Lúcio Costa arrives with intersecting lines like a spine and wings, and Oscar Niemeyer arrives carrying only a curve, which makes the straight line tremble. The plateau summons him before the Court of the City Not Yet Born, where Emptiness is judge, the wind is clerk and the future waits behind the door, and asks by what right he fills it. Gravity takes the stand, the slender columns of the Alvorada Palace say they carry the illusion that the palace is weightless, the domes and towers of the National Congress speak of restraint, possibility and power, and the Cathedral rises from the ground calling itself a prayer made of concrete. The hardest witness is a worker who has been told he is building the future, and when the judge asks whether he will live in it nobody answers, so that the architect learns that beauty may arrive before justice. When Brasília opens and stands before him young, white and alone on the plateau, she asks whether she is the city he dreamed of, and he answers that she is a question the size of a capital, whose destiny her people will draw.