By James Holston
The utopian layout and association of Bras?lia—the modernist new capital of Brazil—were intended to rework Brazilian society. during this refined, pioneering learn of Bras?lia from its inception in 1957 to the current, James Holston analyzes this try to switch society via development a brand new type of urban and the ways that the paradoxes of creating an imagined destiny subvert its utopian premises. Integrating anthropology with equipment of research from structure, city experiences, social historical past, and important thought, Holston offers a critique of modernism according to a powerfully leading edge ethnography of town.
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Extra resources for The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia
Sample text
23) states that the plan consists of three essential structural elements: the crossing of two axes, two terraced embanicments, and a platform (fig. 5). The axial cross defines the area of the city, contained within the figure of an equilateral triangle that is superimposed on the cross. It also defines the city's orientation as the axes are aligned with the cardinal directions. The equilateral triangle marks the area of urbanized land called the PIano Piloto. This term is used both as the name of Costa's plan and as a place name to distinguish the modernist city of the plan from the originally unplanned satellite cities around it.
It uses the past as an endorsement of its particular projection of the future-after which the past is swept away. We shall therefore give careful consideration to the role of history in the legitimation of Brasilia; and, moreover, to the way we may use historical analysis to undermine any self-serving search for precedents. Furthermore, I have suggested that modernist decontextualization rests on a theory of transformation in which the radical qualities of something totally out of context colonize that which exists around it.
The introduction of new building types into the old fabric of the city affects the whole by transforming it" (Lissitzky 1970 [1929]: 52). In this theory of architectural condensation and radiation, the assemblage of condensers produces a total environment for a future society. It is a doctrine characterized by a type of environmental determinism in which there can be no half measures or partial solutions to the crisis of industrial or industrializing society. One of the most distinctive and original features of modernist architecture is that it refuses any accommodation whatsoever to existing urban and social conditions.