Word: brasilia
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...Kubitschek had indeed been pleading for anything, he might have deserved credit for a plea well presented. After a second meeting, Dulles dashed off for a luncheon talk before the American Chamber of Commerce, then flew to Brazil's new capital, Brasilia, for a farewell dinner with Kubitschek. Then he headed back for Washington, where at week's end the Export-Import Bank announced that credits totaling $58 million in favor of the Bank of Brazil had been granted by a consortium of U.S. private banks, along with a $100 million credit from the Export-Import Bank itself...
President Kubitschek wanted Niemeyer to design Brasilia alone. But Niemeyer staged a public competition for the pilot plan, was jubilant when the winning entry-a city plan that from above looks like an airplane-was submitted by his old teacher, Lucio Costa. Said his former pupil: "Costa set high standards and we will keep to them...
Busy Maturity. Since Pampulha, Niemeyer has designed monuments and museums, schools and service stations, weekend cottages and water towers, arenas and airports, apartment houses and factories. In scale he ranges from Brasilia's tiny Dom Bosco roadside shrine to the huge Quintadinha project for Petropolis: a vast, curved apartment house 33 stories high and 1,380 ft. long, designed to house 5,700 families. With Costa he sketched the 1939 New York World's Fair Brazilian Pavilion. He became Brazil's delegate to the U.N.'s architectural board, designed a sector of West Berlin...
...land," he said. "Then I mull over it for a couple of days. Finally the idea comes." One result of such fast work: dwellers sometimes complain about the lack of closets or kitchen windows in Niemeyer houses; builders sweat over specifications that often make light of construction problems. At Brasilia the builder of the Palace of the Dawn reported that each V-shaped pillar "took two weeks to frame and pour, another two weeks to face with small stone squares as specified." But, he added: "It turned out very pretty...
...Brasilia Niemeyer must still design theaters, stations, airport buildings, must approve every private venture, find materials, supervise all projects. For the city's 3,000-seat cathedral, he plans a tepee of concrete poles 220 ft. high, sheathed in translucent plastic and stained glass. "Brasilia," says Niemeyer, "begins a new phase in my work, more geometrical, more simple, more monumental." Post-Brasilia outlook: "I have not thought about it. I suppose I will have to start my life all over again...