page_title: Brasília
section_title: Costa plan
hierarchical_section_title: Brasília / History / Costa plan
caption_attribution_description: One of the first plans of Brasília. A digital photo of the original plan, which is on permanent public display at the O Espaço Lúcio Costa in Brasília.
context_page_description: Brasília is the federal capital of Brazil and seat of government of the Federal District. The city is located atop the Brazilian highlands in the country's center-western region. It was founded on April 21, 1960, to serve as the new national capital. Brasília is estimated to be Brazil's third-most populous city. Among major Latin American cities, it has the highest GDP per capita.
  Brasília was planned and developed by Lúcio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer and Joaquim Cardozo in 1956 in a scheme to move the capital from Rio de Janeiro to a more central location. The landscape architect was Roberto Burle Marx. The city's design divides it into numbered blocks as well as sectors for specified activities, such as the Hotel Sector, the Banking Sector, and the Embassy Sector. Brasília was chosen as a UNESCO World Heritage Site due to its modernist architecture and uniquely artistic urban planning. It was named "City of Design" by UNESCO in October 2017 and has been part of the Creative Cities Network since then.
  All three branches of Brazil's federal government are centered in the city: executive, legislative and judiciary. Brasília also hosts 124 foreign embassies.
context_section_description: Juscelino Kubitschek was elected President of Brazil in 1955. Upon taking office in January 1956, in fulfilment of his campaign pledge, he initiated the planning and construction of the new capital. The following year an international jury selected Lúcio Costa's plan to guide the construction of Brazil's new capital, Brasília. Costa was a student of the famous modernist architect Le Corbusier, and some of modernism's architecture features can be found in his plan. Costa's plan was not as detailed as some of the plans presented by other architects and city planners. It did not include land use schedules, models, population charts or mechanical drawings; however, it was chosen by five out of six jurors because it had the features required to align the growth of a capital city. Even though the initial plan was transformed over time, it oriented much of the construction and most of its features survived.
  Brasília's accession as the new capital and its designation for the development of an extensive interior region inspired the symbolism of the plan. Costa used a cross-axial design indicating the possession and conquest of this new place with a cross, often likened to a dragonfly, an airplane or a bird. Costa's plan included two principal components, the Monumental Axis (east to west) and the Residential Axis (north to south).
  The Monumental Axis was assigned political and administrative activities, and is considered the body of the city with the style and simplicity of its buildings, oversized scales, and broad vistas and heights, producing the idea of Monumentality. This axis includes the various ministries, national congress, presidential palace, supreme court building and the television and radio tower.
  The Residential Axis was intended to contain areas with intimate character and is considered the most important achievement of the plan; it was designed for housing and associated functions such as local commerce, schooling, recreations and churches, constituted of 96 superblocks limited to six stories buildings and 12 additional superblocks limited to three stories buildings; Costa's intention with superblocks was to have small self-contained and self-sufficient neighborhoods and uniform buildings with apartments of two or three different categories, where he envisioned the integration of upper and middle classes sharing the same residential area. But at that time he did not foresee the growing population in the city. The capacity limit in his plan later caused the formation of many favelas, poorer, more densely populated satellite cities around Brasília, peopled by migrants from other place in the country. 
  The urban design of the communal apartment blocks was based on Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse of 1935, and the superblocks on the North American Radburn layout from 1929./Visually, the blocks were intended to appear absorbed by the landscape because they were isolated by a belt of tall trees and lower vegetation. Costa attempted to introduce a Brazil that was more equitable, he also designed housing for the working classes that was separated from the upper- and middle-class housing and was visually different, with the intention of avoiding slums (favelas) in the urban periphery. The superquadra has been accused of being a space where individuals are oppressed and alienated to a form of spatial segregation.
  One of the main objectives of the plan was to allow the free flow of automobile traffic, the plan included lanes of traffic in a north–south direction (seven for each direction) for the Monumental Axis and three arterials (the W3, the Eixo and the L2) for the residential Axis; the cul-de-sac access roads of the superblocks were planned to be the end of the main flow of traffic. And the reason behind the heavy emphasis on automobile traffic is the architect's desire to establish the concept of modernity in every level.
  Though automobiles were invented prior to the 20th century, mass production of vehicles in the early 20th made them widely available; thus, they became a symbol of modernity. The two small axes around t
caption: Plano Piloto
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