Re-Visioning Brasilia

Art in America, Jan, 2000 by TOM McDONOUGH

Such formalist assumptions underlay most early photographs of the capital, and those images both mirrored and contributed to the triumphalist mood of the time. Photographers, true believers in modernist form as much as the architects themselves, produced images of a city almost Neo-Classical in its purity. In the works of Marcel Gautherot, a Frenchman living in Rio de Janeiro, or the American architectural photographer G.E. Kidder-Smith, Brasilia's buildings are pictured at angles chosen to ensure that structures, viewed from a sufficient distance, appear as coherent sculptural wholes, but framed tightly enough so that they are seen as isolated objects, not parts of a larger landscape.

Eberle's and Polidori's divergence from such midcentury conventions is manifest in their photographic strategies. (And here it is worth recalling their shared use of the C-print, whose coloristic extravagance seems positively Baroque compared to the restrained black-and-white photography characteristic of the modernist 1950s.) Their images of Brasilia tend toward extremes, showing either close-up details that fragment the unity of a building, or environmental views that insist on the significance of a structure's context. One example of the former strategy is Eberle's Congress IV, which intensifies the already abstracted geometries of the legislative halls. Another is Polidori's Ministries Windows, No. 1, Brasilia, July 1998, which shows just one end of the rectangular block of a curtain-walled building. The regularity of the grid of windows is overwhelmed by a wealth of incidental detail: air conditioners appear at random, vertical blinds hang in various states of disarray and the glass itself varies in tint from pane to pane. We might consider Polidori's interest in Classical archeology--he has photographed sites from Libya to the Levant--for he brings the same historical detachment to this view of the ministry as he does to an antique temple, half-ruined and now occupied by people whose lives have little to do with its past grandeur.

Polidori pulls back in Ministries at Dusk, Brasilia, July 1998 to reveal a line of 10 identical forms marching along in the distance, but, again, his vantage point deflates the modernist rhetoric of seriality intended by Niemeyer. Our attention is drawn less to the structures' abstract qualities than to certain details: the abundance of radio antennae and satellite dishes on the roofs, the burnt-out spotlight that fails to illuminate the side wall of the third ministry from the left, the tattiness of the ground separating us from the line of buildings, the sodium glare of the street lamps.

Such photographs could easily be assimilated to the long-standing criticism of Brasilia as a Kafkaesque, bureaucratic nightmare: rows of mirror-image, glass-and-steel buildings whose interiors hold a warren of offices for all the petty officials of a down-at-the-heels country. From the start, this view of an urban dystopia has coexisted alongside the modernist celebration of pure form. Italian architectural historian Bruno Zevi famously decried the depersonalizing effect of the city's broad avenues and cold modernist styling.