Long before the first stone was laid, the idea of a capital in Brazil's interior was already ancient. As early as 1827, José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva, an advisor to Emperor Pedro I, proposed to the General Assembly that a new city be built in the country's vast inland territory and named Brasília — the word itself derived from the Latin rendering of Brazil. The assembly was dissolved before the bill could pass, and the project vanished into the archive of unrealized ambitions. It surfaced again in the constitution of 1891, which designated a vast tract of the Goiás plateau as a future federal district, but decades passed without action. Rio de Janeiro remained the capital, dense, coastal, and increasingly inadequate for a country whose population and territory were spreading westward.
The figure who finally translated the dream into concrete and glass was Juscelino Kubitschek. Elected president in 1955 on a platform of accelerated development — "50 years in 5" was the slogan — he selected the relocation of the capital as the centerpiece of his ambitions. In 1956, a presidential commission chose a specific site on the elevated plateau of Goiás, roughly a thousand meters above sea level, in a region that was, for practical purposes, wilderness. The commission's criteria favored geographic centrality, defensibility, and proximity to the headwaters of major river systems.
Kubitschek chose Lúcio Costa to design the urban plan and Oscar Niemeyer to design the principal government buildings. Roberto Burle Marx would handle the landscape architecture. Costa's master plan arranged the city in the shape of an airplane — or, in some descriptions, a bird in flight — with two intersecting axes. The Monumental Axis, running east to west, formed the "fuselage" of the plane, flanked by wide avenues and a broad central park. At its eastern tip sat the Praça dos Três Poderes, the Plaza of the Three Powers, with the Congress, the Supreme Court, and the presidential palace each occupying a vertex of the triangle. The "wings" of the airplane were residential superblocks, organized into numbered units that divided the city into sectors with specified functions: a Hotel Sector, a Banking Sector, an Embassy Sector, a Medical Sector, each in its designated zone.
Niemeyer's buildings translated this rational framework into an architecture of extraordinary formal invention. The National Congress featured twin towers flanked by a dome and an inverted dome — the Senate beneath the dome, the Chamber of Deputies beneath the bowl. The presidential palace, the Palácio da Alvorada, balanced on curved white columns that tapered to knife-edge points. The Supreme Court echoed the same vocabulary of slender columns and sweeping concrete forms. The whole composition was painted in a uniform white that blazed in the highland sun.
Construction proceeded with a pace that strained every logistical system the country possessed. Workers, known as candangos, arrived from the drought-stricken northeast by the tens of thousands to build a city from nothing on a red-dirt plain. Supplies had to be flown in or transported over primitive roads. The budget overruns were severe. Inflation accelerated. But Kubitschek was immovable in his deadline: the capital would be inaugurated before his term expired.
On 21 April 1960, Brasília was officially inaugurated as the capital of Brazil. Rio de Janeiro, which had served as the seat of government since 1763 — first as the capital of the Portuguese colonial empire and then of the independent nation — yielded its status. The transfer of federal functions was gradual, with some ministries and agencies moving years after the formal inauguration, but the political center of Brazil had definitively shifted.
The city grew faster than its planners had anticipated, and not always in the ways they envisioned. The superblock residential areas, intended for a socially mixed population, became increasingly middle-class and government-oriented. Workers who had built the city and could not afford its planned housing settled in satellite cities on the outskirts of the Federal District, creating a metropolitan reality that bore little resemblance to the original blueprint. Today the Federal District is divided into thirty-five administrative regions, only one of which — the Plano Piloto — encompasses the originally planned city. The entire district is treated by official statistics as Brasília's urban area, and together with twelve neighboring municipalities in Goiás it forms a broader metropolitan region.
Brasília today is Brazil's third most populous city, home to approximately 2.8 million people, with the highest GDP per capita of any major Latin American city. All three branches of Brazil's federal government are based there, along with 124 foreign embassies. Its international airport connects it to every major Brazilian city and to international destinations, ranking as the third busiest in the country. In 1987, UNESCO designated it a World Heritage Site in recognition of its modernist architecture and its uniquely coherent urban design. In October 2017, UNESCO also named it a City of Design, incorporating it into the Creative Cities Network. It hosted matches in the 2013 FIFA Confederations Cup, the 2014 FIFA World Cup, and the 2016 Summer Olympics — a city that once existed only on paper, now a fixture on the world stage.
