The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia

by James Holston

The utopian design and organization of Brasília—the modernist new capital of Brazil—were meant to transform Brazilian society. In this sophisticated, pioneering study of Brasília from its inception in 1957 to the present, James Holston analyzes this attempt to change society by building a new kind of city and the ways in which the paradoxes of constructing an imagined future subvert its utopian premises. Integrating anthropology with methods of analysis from architecture, urban studies, social history, and critical theory, Holston presents a critique of modernism based on a powerfully innovative ethnography of the city.

Genres: Anthropology, Architecture, Cities, Urbanism, Sociology, History, Nonfiction

383 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

Reviews

[Seán · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holston's study of Brasilia, Modernism's sterile nightmareburg in the Brazilian cerrado, is a masterpiece of interdisciplinary scholarship. We're talking a hot-fire melding of critical urban anthropology and sociological analysis of Brazil and its social order, and field study aimed at a sort of modernist ethnography combined with a dexterous history of architecture and urban development in the modernist and Brazilian traditions.

The book was written from the late 70s to late 80s, the period when the bloom really started to go off Post-structionalism's turd blossom. Fortunately, Holston avoids nearly all of his contemporaries' frustrating hack techniques, what DFW called the "willfully opaque and pretentious" writing of academics. Perhaps because he was examining real lives and an actual built environment, Holston never lets highfalutin theorytalk (curses to show-off parentheses!) get in the way of clarity.

At the core, Holston is concerned with the stated and unstated intentions of (1) Brasilia's Designers, i.e., the architects, planners, and visionaries of Modernism; and (2) Brasilia's Masters, the government and its bureaucratic aristocracy. Through an immanent critique, Holston takes each at its word and examines their declared intentions (both groups proclaimed a glorious new dawn for the nation) but also identifies contradictory, unvoiced objectives, faint but still scrutable in blueprints and executive orders.

For the designers, the secret purpose was to use architecture to remake society, to create an environment that would restructure people's lives on the order of machines. Each function of life (work, commerce, and family life) would be separated and rechanneled toward a well-regulated utopia. For the state, Brasilia was to jump-start a new and more modern nation, but also to serve as an exemplary city populated almost solely by the upper rungs of the bureaucracy. The lex situs would, with little pretense, privilege an elite with housing and property rights while deny basic democratic rights (kind of like a Brazilian take on Washington, D.C.).

Now, anyone who's walked through an American city in the last fifty years knows that modernist planning and architecture has failed on a grand scale. There probably isn't a place--not one room of one poured-concrete shitbox--where it has managed to make good on any of its stated goals. Modernist architecture does not inspire humanity with its bold and mechanistic forms, nor has it led us to live in more socially conscious ways. Rather than evolving into glittering, people-free utopias, cities continue to house human beings, people who now must navigate an environment pockmarked by unarticulated, windowless streetscapes, parking-lot patch quilts, and horrifying, leaking wonderstructures of unsurpassed ugliness.

Yet, although Le Corbusier may have been no match for poverty or elegance, modernism has been immeasurably successful in its lesser-known mission to serve authoritarians on the cheap. Modernism's symbols have a wide range of appeal, from socialist administrations to military juntas, from hardnosed Marxists to image-conscious corporations. Holston shows that a utopian vision premised on undemocratic and coercive assumptions will inevitably serve two masters, with the authoritarians winning out once the superblock is built and the architect is back at the next CIAM conference. Once set, the pattern is repeated and amplified continuously.

Founded on a paradox, Brasiliense society developed from the interaction of its utopic and dystopic elements. This dialectic generated new administrative initiatives as planners tried to keep the actual in line with the imagined. These directives, however, only reiterated the initial paradox: for planners responded to the deformation of their plans by exorcising the factors they held responsible (such as illegal squatter settlements, chaotic growth, and subversive political organization) by the same dystopic measures (such as denying political rights, repressing voluntary associations, and restricting distribution of public goods). Thus, in compounding the basic contradictions of Brasilia's premises, they created an exaggerated version--almost a caricature--of what they sought to escape. Their initiatives produced an unique city, but not the one they imagined. Rather, they turned Brasilia into an exemplar of social and spatial stratification--one that clearly demonstrates, moreover, the role of government in promoting inequality.

The book also contains many illuminating historical digressions, including a fascinating series of images of 18th century Rio de Janeiro. Additionally, Holston lays out even the most abstract principles of traditional urban design in clear and succinct terms. Here he is absolutely spot-on regarding the basic solid-vs.-void elements of a traditional streetscape:

The principal convention of difference ordering the street in both perceptual experience and architectural composition is the organization of its solids and voids into figure and ground relations. We perceive the city street as both a void and a volume of space contained by surrounding solids. As a void, it reveals these solids; as a volume it takes the shape of its container. The street thus constitutes a special kind of empty space; it is a void that has a defined shape, usually a rectangular volume. From the context of its containing solids, the street emerges as a distinct and recognizable figure, one which is empty but which has form.

My lone criticism is that Holston dismisses out of hand neo-traditionalism because of the fallacy of its nostalgia and as a "regressive response to the progressive utopias of modernism." While I agree a lot of neo-traditionalist planning is either idiotically nostalgic for an illusory imagined past or simply another marketing technique covering up the same old crap (see, Potemkin village TNDs with quaint facades masking ginormous beasthomes), what else is there? Generally, post-modernism and deconstructivism as well as this neo-moderist bullshit are just as bad, if not worse, than the anti-human, power-worshiping garbage of modernism. If we can't learn from the past and repair the lunatic firebombing of the later 20th century, we will slowly but surely lose everything of the pre- and early industrial city that works.

[Gnarly Authenticity . · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overlook the plodding prose and over-elaborate conceits such as the extended analysis of figure and void in city architecture and you've got a very good book about the dark comedy of central planning. How did a utopian communist visionary end up designing apartments with built-in servant's quarters? "In Brazil no other way is possible".

[Alice · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting content often hidden amongst elaborate explanations of complex architectural terminology and extensive background information. Read if you want a mass of information, and best of luck picking out the interesting aspects.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating look at how architecture, physical structure, can affect how people live. It seems obvious in hindsight, but you don't realize to what depth people are affected by their homes until you read something like this.