Brasilia Pilot Plan’s Banking Sector and its Model Photographs

A Tool for Control and Planning

Abstract

Perhaps there is no catchier image of Brasilia Pilot Plan's centre than the photographs of the Banking Sector model. Such images illustrate Oscar Niemeyer's contribution to Lucio Costa’s Pilot Plan and are frequently attached to descriptions of a urbanism of homogeneous and repetitive forms, which does not change over time, nor does it incorporate different actors in its design and construction process. These reports understand the model as a rigid, faithful formal representation of the set to be built, and, perhaps because of this, they do not recognize intricacies about the history of the sector that can offer a better understanding of the city thought of by modern architecture. One of these intricacies is that Niemeyer chose to not design the sector's buildings. Following this procedure, the Banking Sector, as built, had indeed changed from its model. But instead of claiming the mismatch as a plan failure, this paper advocates Niemeyer’s decision as a planning one, which can be explained precisely through the photographs of the model of the sector. These photographs circulated in different contexts like official publications and informal exchanges of letters. They were used as political propaganda at the same time that they were pointed out by specialized critics as an example of the failure of modern urbanism. They were objects of ever-changing interpretations to finally become a tool to control the development of the area.