Word: kubitscheks
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...constitution of 1891. But after decades of lip service, nobody took the project seriously, even after an Ithaca, N.Y. aerial mapping expert picked a 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...
Sign of the Cross. Eight months after his inauguration, Congress passed a law setting up the Companhia Urbanizadora da Nova Capital do Brasil (Novacap) to build the city. Says Kubitschek: "Nobody thought I could or would do it." Kubitschek could. And Brazil's great architects caught his enthusiasm...
...Oscar Niemeyer, 52, a dormant Communist ("I am too old to change," he once said), and an old pupil and admirer of Costa, casually agreed during an automobile ride with his friend Kubitschek in 1956 to design Brasilia's major buildings. He set to work at a government salary of $300 a month to make a city for "free and happy people who appreciate pure and simple things...
...Brasilia federal district at $1 per acre, sold selected lots for $3 per square meter and up, a plan that will raise one-fifth of Brasilia's costs. He hired 1,500 contractors, flew in the first building materials at high cost. Through Kubitschek, Novacap raided departmental budgets. Checking the figures, newsmen have found at least $117 million of financing for Brasilia. It absorbed, for example, 95% of all hospital construction funds for 1959. As deficit spending sent the cruzeiro spiraling from 65 to 200 to the dollar, the opposition awoke. "The limit of insanity! A dictatorship...
Dirt & Deadlines. But up the capital went. In June 1958, Kubitschek spent a weekend in his Palace of the Dawn (called "Niemeyer's cardiogram" by critics because of its leaping concrete pillars-see color). Pinheiro tacked signs marking the completion date on every building; ten-story ministries rose in 45, 36, even 28 days. More than 5,000 miles of road, most of it straight as a pencil, stretched out to São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Fortaleza, and even across the jungle to Belém at the mouth of the Amazon. Morbidly afraid of dark rooms, elevators...