Word: brasilia
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...visit in February. President Eisenhower was reminded of "our own decision many years ago to move the capital of our fledgling nation from Philadelphia." But in the move to Washington in 1800, only 126 bureaucrats made the trek by coach and horseback, while state papers went by ship. Brasilia will have 120,000 citizens next week and 500,000 within ten years. No new capital-Ankara, Canberra or New Delhi-compares with it for scope and speed...
Hang the Cost. Brasilia is a skyscraper city sprung metropolis-size from a broad plateau where, just 43 months ago, Kubitschek recalls, "there was only solitude and a jaguar screaming in the night." It was thrown up at a hang-the-cost speed that wrenched the whole country's economy. Forty-five million cubic meters of red earth were ripped out by a $50 million army of machines. The final price tag will top Brazil's annual budget...
...critics dub him "Pharaoh Juscelino" because historians reach back for a comparison to the Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, who between 1375 and 1358 B.C. built the Egyptian capital of Akhetaton after deciding that Thebes was out of favor with his god. In ambition, though not in tragic cost, Brasilia might also be compared to St. Petersburg (now Leningrad), erected on inhospitable marsh, at a cost of more than 30,000 lives, to gratify Peter the Great's passion to open ingrown Russia to the Baltic and to Western influence. Kubitschek also looks west, but inwardly: he proposes to populate Brazil...
...site in 1955, much as Brazil's patron saint predicted, at 15° 30 min. latitude in the state of Goiás. Kubitschek's first encounter with the project came from a heckler at a Goiás rally during the 1955 campaign. "What about Brasilia?" yelled the heckler. Kubitschek yelled back: "I will implement the constitution." He recalls: "I had hardly considered Brasilia before then...
...flashy modern architecture, won the contest for a master city plan. While others submitted blueprints and models, Costa sketched on five sheets of paper what one judge, Britain's Sir William Holford, called "a city with solutions, not problems, built in." Says Costa: "The shape of Brasilia was born out of the simple gesture of a man who indicates a place or marks it as his own: two lines crossing at right angles...