The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia Review

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(More customer reviews)That book does a poor job in order to make the circumstances of the project and the construction of Brasília clear to the interested scholar - and to the general reader. Holston does the most complete reification of a modernist ideology embodied in Brasília, and treats it in an ideological way. That's a serious mistake. In spite of that, the mythological creation of the city by Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer is very impressively described, and that description can itself be called a classic of our times (in that special issue and in that kind of literature), because it is a craving and iconoclastic criticism of the way that Brazilian urbanistic modernism achieved an almost Olympian turning point in the 1950's. But the author missed the city almost completely. His book is about architects and ideologies, it is not about a modernist but real city. AFTER the project, after the celebrated euphoria of the conception of the city, the process of its very occupation and its continued construction (until our days) is categorically ignored. A hint of that must had to be done. The reader and the architects are put in a cloud and we can remember Aristophanes. So, you, reader, have to take only the Holston's interpretation in order to suppose what happened AFTER in the city's "planned" evolution. And that order of suppositions can be very misleading. The "socialist", egalitarian dreams affirmed by those architects about their plans for the city were reenacted many times after, with different degrees of success and failure. That initially promising anthropological study lost an excellent opportunity to delve us in the necessary reflection about modernist fallacies - and virtues - by studying what really happened in the 40 years after the creational discourse of Brasília (or at least a sketch of that...). As that modernist propaganda and sophistry it denounces, just the surface of the extraordinaire phenomenon of the Brasília's episode was exposed. Take care with the clouds, reader.

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The utopian design and organization of Brasília—the modernist new capital of Brazil—were meant to transform Brazilian society. In this sophisticated, pioneering study of Brasília from its inception in 1957 to the present, James Holston analyzes this attempt to change society by building a new kind of city and the ways in which the paradoxes of constructing an imagined future subvert its utopian premises. Integrating anthropology with methods of analysis from architecture, urban studies, social history, and critical theory, Holston presents a critique of modernism based on a powerfully innovative ethnography of the city.

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