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The dream of an inland capital of Brazil is an old one; it was written into the 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:
¶ Lúcio Costa, 58, son of a Brazilian admiral, a lifelong pacifist and the acknowledged father of Brazil's flashy modern architecture, won the contest for a master city plan. While others submitted blueprints and models, Costa sketched on five sheets of paper what one judge, Britain's Sir William Holford, called "a city with solutions, not problems, built in." Says Costa: "The shape of Brasilia was born out of the simple gesture of a man who indicates a place or marks it as his own: two lines crossing at right angles."
¶ 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."
Novacap President Israel Pinheiro bounced into a small clearing in a DC-3 and surveyed his site: a cool, green plateau cut into a V by the tawny waters of two streams, the Fundo and Bananal. "I spent 18 months with my wife in a single room in a wooden bunkhouse," says Pinheiro. "I stayed there for propaganda. If it was good enough for me, it was good enough for everybody." A whip-tongued engineer, Pinheiro bounced over crude roads in his Jeep, barking endless orders over his radiotelephone: "This is Novacap No. 1 calling."