Oscar Niemeyer is a glorified disaster in usability; his buildings are the most wonderful and unusable crap.
I worked for 3 months in a building that is now a museum to his creations: http://www.cliquearquitetura.com.br/portal/blog/view/mon-mus... It basically looks like the scenery from "The Jetsons" cartoons/series. It is cool from the outside but is an horrible place to be inside the whole day.
It's official name was "Castelo Branco" (white castle) but everyone called it "white elephant".
What made it beautiful is that it looks like a white slab floating over a field with a rain forest park behind. What made it atrocious is that the thing had no windows or ventilation, bad water drainage and it is in the middle of the rain forest region: hot, humid and moldy; the perfect breeding place for respiratory diseases. Most people would work very little time there before leaving to treat allergies, flu, pneumonia and even tuberculosis.
Just to be sure that it is clear, Neimaier was the architect of most of the buildings in Brasilia, but not the man who made the urban plan. That was Lucio Costa.
I'm not trying to defend him, he approaches architecture with the intent to create his own brand of ‘beauty’ which results in buildings like you experienced, but he should not be blamed for Brasilia's possible failure as a city.
Like the article mentioned, Brasilia is a glorified disaster in usability for everyone except those in cars. It's terrible for humans on foot or on bicycles. However the biggest travesty was the decision to locate the city in an area that has a 10-15% relative humidity during the winter months (May to September). It is so dry that your eyes and throat will be very dry, scratchy and uncomfortable and your lips will become chapped. Some people even experience nosebleeds from the excessive dryness.
The other problem with Brasilia is the 99%er problem. The city was built by the 99% for the 1%. All the 99%ers ended up in the slummy satellite cities, where the quality of life is low and where there hasn't been any real sources of economic activity to raise the quality of life.
Also, important to remember, Brasilia is in the middle of no-fucking-where. I remember when my - then - wife wanted to get a tourism visa to the US you had two options: go to São Paulo, or Brasilia. Brasilia had half the waiting time, but for us living in Santa Catarina it was simply a no-go.
I wish there were more concrete examples (and diagrams) of how things at "eye level" didn't work in Brasília. Is it just the straight, too-far paths to each landmark? Is there a lack of connecting bridges across the freeways?
Also, a little more exploration of how this applies to web and app design would be interesting. It seems that the lessons from Brasília would be inverted: thinking too much of the small details and not of the broad visual scope (especially across pages). It doesn't seem like too many designers get hung up on designing for a far-out zoom level, since you learn pretty early that you have limited screen space to work with.
Mostly the distances combined with automobile traffic I think.
The biggest problem area of Brasília in my opinion is incidentally where the landmarks are concentrated, on the "Esplanada" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monumental_Axis). It's an extremely wide open area with little tree cover, and bounded by wide roads encouraging aggressive driving and persistent exhaust fumes. Although the landmarks themselves are interesting, it's just not that much fun to walk between them. If you contrast to The Malls of Washington DC or London, the difference is that Brasília is clearly auto-oriented. You can drive from point A to point B in Brasília perhaps faster than any city in the world, but there is a severe tradeoff in how pleasant it is to stroll around the center. If you need to traverse the epicenter where there are 3 levels of vehicle traffic with a parking lot for the shopping center overlaying the central bus station, overlaying an underground tunnel that keeps the central flow moving, there's just no way to avoid feeling like a very tiny insect in a vast pneumatic machine ejecting vehicular traffic to every possible known destination.
That said, once you get out of the very center into the residential superblocks, I find it to be quite picturesque and pleasant to walk around. Each superblock has only a single entrance and has speed bumps throughout, so traffic is well controller. The apartment buildings are mostly raised so the ground floor is open and you can walk underneath. This makes it so you can walk on almost every square inch of ground in the residential areas. It certainly lacks a certain urban vibrancy that many Brazilians and Latinos love about their South American cities, but it's also unique in the world and inviting in its own way.
I'd definitely recommend a visit since this scale of urban planning is quite a rare opportunity.
If you're ever in upstate NY, check out the Empire State Plaza in Albany ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_State_Plaza ), which is a massive complex of government buildings designed with similar principles to the government core of Brasilia.
They basically gutted the core of the city and built a million square feet of office space, connected by massive underground concourses, mazes of tunnels, and an outdoor concourse that resembles a Roman forum scaled for giant robots.
I think that one of the design principles was that senior bureaucrats would never need to be exposed to outdoor air or the city they work in the middle of. Hit the garage door opener, roll into your underground parking garage, and stroll through the corridors to your office.
It's literally a fifteen minute walk to get to a coffee shop on the street outside of the complex.
The style of the "Cultural Education Center" there reminds me of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in LA (early 1960s) -- monumental architecture on an elevated stone plaza, with a fountain and sculpture in front and parking beneath. It was also designed at the behest of a rich old cultural icon (Rockefeller in Albany, Dorothy "Buffy" Chandler in LA).
As you point out, one of the problems of this architectural style is that the resulting building is totally disconnected from the surrounding streetscape. It took decades for the area around the Chandler Pavilion in LA to gain back some significant buildings that had a relation to the street.
It turns out it's actually a net minus for the area if the people going to the building just park underneath, go up, do their business, and exit. The resulting bubble creates an obstacle for organic development nearby.
That's Brasília. With an S and an accent on the i that follows.
Niemeyer is not responsible for the urban planning of Brasília, someone else did. His role was to design some of its most prominent individual elements and ensure a visual language throughout the whole project.
The crazy urban planning was the work of Lúcio Costa (thanks Wikipedia): why not using a quote by him, instead?
Pitting urbanists against architects is just as futile as pitting Android fanboys against iOS fanboys.
FYI - The film referenced, Urbanized, is available for streaming on Netflix. I watched it a few weeks back and thoroughly enjoyed it even though I'm not particularly versed or overly interested in the subject.
If anyone is interested in seeing a city design by a single visionary that does work, I highly recommend checking out Yerevan Armenia - a project headed by Alexander Tamanyan 85 years ago - that is in parts still being implemented.
Actually, that would be Chandigarh[1], a city that was designed by Corbu himself. There is a lot to be said about the city, but it is probably not what people would expect from him (I've heard from people who have been that it is actually quite humanistic). This is quite common with Corbu, since he is the favourite scapegoat in architecture.
The title appears to have been editorialized from the actual one: "Brasília: an excerpt from Urbanized". As the submitter is the site's owner, perhaps the altered title was thought to appeal more to HN? I was hoping to read about some interesting concepts that emerged from using Photoshop at the wrong zoom level.
Understandably the urban planners did not anticipate that technology would make us less dependent on cars instead of more. I assume linear regression is what contemporary planners use as well. I wonder what are the main concerns taken into account when planning for rapidly growin urban cities in Asia for example, and how they will turn out to be in 50 years
The Netherlands has twenty times the density and four times the per capita income. Brazil is vast. It is nearly as far from Brasilia to Natal as from Amsterdam to Moscow.
anyway, it's true, it's a 'beautiful city', but the 'UX' is horrible, people from much bigger cities likes São Paulo or Rio arrive here and feel like everything is way too far away(even tho you could fit 10 Brasílias inside São Paulo), also, apparently it was made for cars to move through, not people
Me and my friends theorize how this, and other architectural decisions, like the way the city is heavily location/class segregated(specially considering it's the city with the worst case of income concentration of Brazil) affects the people here, they're not as welcoming as they are in other cities we went, in our opinion
Brasilia was indeed designed based on automotive travel following Corbusian urban design principals.
These principles were developed in response to the conditions found in the world's slums using a central planning concept. Gehl's approach came about a generation later (in the U.S. Jane Jacob's Life and Death of American Cities was a response to the centralized approach to improving urban spaces).
Both Gehl's and Jacobs may be criticized for failing to address the horrible conditions to which Brasilia (and the CIAM modernists) were responding. 1960's Greenwich Village and Holland don't replicate the conditions of Brazil's favelas*.
I worked for 3 months in a building that is now a museum to his creations: http://www.cliquearquitetura.com.br/portal/blog/view/mon-mus... It basically looks like the scenery from "The Jetsons" cartoons/series. It is cool from the outside but is an horrible place to be inside the whole day.
It's official name was "Castelo Branco" (white castle) but everyone called it "white elephant".
What made it beautiful is that it looks like a white slab floating over a field with a rain forest park behind. What made it atrocious is that the thing had no windows or ventilation, bad water drainage and it is in the middle of the rain forest region: hot, humid and moldy; the perfect breeding place for respiratory diseases. Most people would work very little time there before leaving to treat allergies, flu, pneumonia and even tuberculosis.