Superquadras
Niemeyer, Oscar
Download1A1-NO-B-8-C2_cp.jpg (454.2Kb)
Date
1957-1960Description
Side view of shops along street; Behind the construction of Brasília lay a monumental campaign to construct an entire city in the barren center of the country, hundreds of kilometers from any major city. Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa used it to test new concepts of city planning: streets without transit, buildings floating off the ground supported by columns and allowing the space underneath to be free and integrated with nature. The project also had a socialist ideology: in Brasília all the apartments would be owned by the government and rented to its employees. (This later changed in practice.) Both low-cost and luxury housing were built by the government in the central city area. The residential zones of the inner city are arranged into superquadras ("superblocks"), groups of apartment buildings along with a prescribed number and type of schools, retail stores, and open spaces. Source: Wikipedia; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page (accessed 7/13/2010)
Type of Work
housing project; apartment houseSubject
architecture, business, commerce and trade, cityscape, City planning, urban design, planned communities, Twentieth century, Modernist
Rights
Rights Statement
Licensed for educational and research use by the MIT community only