Brasília
— — a city drawn on paper before it had ground.
Not only on a wall.
“Lúcio Costa drew the plan in 1957 on five index cards. Oscar Niemeyer answered with white curves above a dry red plateau. The cathedral opens like sixteen folded hands. The two towers of Congress hold a dome and a bowl between them. From the air, the city still reads as the shape a pilot would draw — wings out, nose pointed east. from the studio
Brasília, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Brasília sits on the central plateau of Brazil at about 1,172 metres, in the Federal District carved from the state of Goiás. President Juscelino Kubitschek moved the capital inland from Rio de Janeiro and inaugurated the new city on 21 April 1960, after roughly forty-one months of construction. The Plano Piloto, drawn by Lúcio Costa, lays the residential and ministerial axes in a cross often read as a bird in flight. UNESCO inscribed the city as a World Heritage Site in 1987, the youngest entry on the list at the time.
Concrete is the material of Brasília. Oscar Niemeyer poured it into curves the city had not seen before — the sixteen hyperboloid ribs of the Cathedral of Brasília, the inverted dome and rising bowl of the National Congress, the slender pilotis of the Palácio da Alvorada. Engineer Joaquim Cardozo solved the structural problems Niemeyer's drawings asked. White surfaces sit hard against the red Cerrado earth. The Three Powers Plaza, finished in 1960, gathers the executive, legislative, and judicial buildings within walking distance of one another.
The city was built in roughly forty-one months. Ground broke in 1956; the inauguration ceremony was held on 21 April 1960, the date Tiradentes is remembered. Workers, called candangos, arrived from the Northeast and lived in encampments that later hardened into satellite towns — Taguatinga, Ceilândia, Sobradinho. The Cerrado's dry season runs May through September, with low humidity and clean afternoon light; the wet season returns the red dust to the air. Independence Day parades fill the Esplanada dos Ministérios every 7 September.