Silver Lining In The Airport City

Airports. Whether you’re in Atlanta or Paris, Rio or Cairo... the feeling is somehow always the same: a feeling of temporality, impermanence and artificiality. You are there, obviously en route to somewhere else, it is not a place to lay roots or experience the intricacies of the city at hand, but a place to get in and get out, a contradiction of infinite cultures and just as many languages, somehow devoid of feeling.

Brasilia is an airport city, the type of city that somehow makes your feel like you could be anywhere in the world, but certainly not in the heart of Brazil... a country dripping with vitality, sweating samba and sex from every one of its pours. Brazil teases and whispers, “Você está no brasil agora gringa”.. but Brasilia is flaccid, unassuming, and altogether monotonous.  

So, why is the alleged heart of this country nearly opposite in every way possible of its vivid surroundings? Well, for one thing… it has only existed for 53 years. From 1763-1960, my beloved Rio was the capital of Brazil... but then the country decided that a more neutral, more geographically central, less resource-rich location was infinitely more appropriate for the nation’s capital. Ipso-facto, they designed Brasilia and called it “Plano Piloto” The pilot plan... as if they knew this was a precarious experiment. “They” being Lúcio Costa as the principal urban planner, and  Oscar Niemeyer as the lead designer.

            

             

53 years later, the result is a city-sized-airport. The streets have no names but instead or carved out in series of rigid letters and numbers spread amongst such rigid zoning, that the coffee shops are afraid to be caught in the ministerial blocks. The buildings are a Pleasantville pattern of one cookie cutter office after another, with the occasional eerie post-modern monster of a national monument awkwardly crouching between them. And the beige paper flowers sold on the street corners are little more than scentless metaphors for the city that silently hawks them.

Critics of the city (and there are MANY) say that the city went awry when Costa and Niemeyer designed for space rather than humanity…what is a city if not designed for humanity?

Robert Hughes, put it bluntly when he said, “Nothing dates faster than people's fantasies about the future. This is what you get when you design for political aspirations rather than real human needs. You get miles of jerry-built platonic nowhere infested with Volkswagens. This, one may fervently hope, is the last experiment of its kind. The utopian buck stops here.”

Luckily, the “utopian buck” can stop wherever the hell it wants because I found a slice of heaven 20 minutes outside the vast expanse of identical ministries and whitewash pavement. I found Kantunta, or so the mansion is called by the 8 fabulous people whom live there. In a stroke of sorte, my Amazonian roommate told me of a friend she had in Brasilia who somehow always had a spare bedroom. Not so surprising when you live in a house of 12 bedrooms, 6 bathrooms, painted perfectly on the north side of Brasilia’s largest body of water. To make the situation even sillier, more than half of the house’s inhabitants are incredible 20-30 something’s who happen to work in my field of research, and those that don’t     are making documentaries about indigenous livelihoods and social unrest in the north. The conversation, needless to say, is both useful and fascinating.

While Brasilia may be an empty space of Niemeyer’s Utopian fantasies, the mansion is a tangible version of my Brazilian fantasy. It is young people, dripping with the vitality that their county exudes, filling each room with the aroma of delicious Portuguese banter. It is a house full of energy and light, complimented by the constant pulse of samba drums and the positive ions of Lago Norte.

 Thanks universe.