Lucio Costa

Lucio Costa drew the plan of Brasilia on a few sheets of paper, submitted it without the models and calculations the competition asked for, and won. He was born in Toulon to Brazilian parents, educated in England and Switzerland, and trained at the National School of Fine Arts in Rio, where he began as a neocolonial revivalist before converting to modernism. Appointed director of the school in 1930 at twenty-eight, he tried to reform the curriculum along modernist lines and was forced out within a year by the faculty. He led the team for the Ministry of Education and Health in 1936, brought Le Corbusier over as consultant, and gave the young Oscar Niemeyer his start. As head of the national heritage service's studies he was equally serious about the colonial baroque of Minas Gerais, and the pairing is the argument of his career: that Brazilian modernism was a continuation of a tradition rather than a rejection of it. His 1957 Pilot Plan for Brasilia laid the city out as two crossed axes, one curved, described in his submission as the gesture of someone taking possession of a place - the sign of the cross. It separated traffic from pedestrians, grouped housing into superquadras with shared amenities, and put the ministries along a monumental axis. Critics have argued ever since that it is a city built for the car and hostile to the street. It was made a World Heritage site in 1987, and he lived to see it. He wrote in the report accompanying the plan that it was born of the primary gesture of marking a place, and that monumentality was not ostentation but the expression of a capital. He defended the city against its critics for the rest of his life while conceding that the residential blocks had been built more cheaply than intended. He is buried in Rio.

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