“In architecture it isn’t enough to just have the right building that works well. It can also be beautiful. It can also be different. It can create surprise. And surprise is the main thing in a work of art. […] I like and respect Brasília very much. It is a simple city, a rational one. I always defend the urban design of Brasília”- Oscar Niemeyer (Architect of Brasília’s Cathederal).
A charming quote, made even more interesting by this biting counterpoint from Architect and Human-Centred Urban Quality Consultant Jan Gehl:
“Brasília was the ultimate modernistic city, built on all the ideas of the modernistic manifests. It looks fantastic from the airplane. But if you are down at eye level, on your feet and going from one place to another, Brasília is a disaster. Every distance is too wide. Things are not connected. You have to trample for endless miles along completely straight paths. Nobody ever started to think about what it would be like to be out in BrasÃlia in between all these monuments.”
Jan explains: “As far as I am concerned, the people scale is THE important scale of all of them. We have the city plan scale, the site plan scale and the people scale. And definitely the people scale, where you touch the city, and where you touch the buildings – that’s what counts for quality. […] I find it striking that the quality of the urban habitat of homo sapiens is so weakly researched compared to the habitat of mountain gorillas and bengal tigers and panda bears in China.”
At Clearleft we often talk about what happens when you design at the wrong level of zoom. Dribbble, for example, encourages you to focus in on a 400×300 pixel rectangle, so you end up with something beautiful that has no bearing on the real user experience. It’s easy to marvel at the theoretical perfection of your work but ultimately it’s not your judgement that matters. The end users – the citizens who has to live in your streets – these are the people who determine its success.
The video clip above is from Gary Hustwit’s Urbanized, which you can now watch online for just $3.99. Highly recommended.
Haha, having worked with architects recently, I can only nod in agreement. Luckily there are urbanists like Jan Gehl who think people are more than pesky ants getting in the way of their concrete masterpiece :)
As UX professionals, it’s a good reality check too. Outside of the web/digital field, user centered design still needs to be evangelised…
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BrasÃlia-bashing is a sport exclusively engaged by people who didn’t live there. BrasÃlia strongly prioritizes the pedestrian and the human scale. So much so that people who stay there for short amounts of time can’t even wrap their heads around it. Example: The common complaint that people don’t walk on the streets in BrasÃlia. Completely false, it just so happens that instead of walking in narrow sidewalks besides the roads, people do walk in the much more pleasant grass all around, and fsckn modernism-bashers can’t even conceive that a course good for cars could not be the priority for people…
Blaise, this is not about architects vs. urbanists. This is about practitioners with a user focus – which are rare in every field – vs. the rest.
Well, I for one am one person who did live in BrasÃlia for ~4 years and can absolutely relate to what’s being said here. It’s a terrible, terrible city for pedestrians, I can’t even begin to imagine how you see it as being strongly prioritized. In Belo Horizonte I can walk to pretty much anywhere in beautiful, tree-laden streets, and I feel like the city is hugging me, whereas in BrasÃlia I felt like I needed to get in my car to do pretty much anything and was deeply troubled by the “too wide” distances.
And the beauty of BrasÃlia is indeed pretty much lost as soon as your plane lands… it is true that in the residential areas there are pleasant places to walk on, but that is not even close to being enough – as soon as you leave your residential block (which you’ll have to do for most things) all bets are off – most places have very bad sidewalks, and some are close to impossible to get to.
“BrasÃlia strongly prioritizes the pedestrian and the human scale.”
if one is inside a car, ‘amirite?
plus, you’re talking about good and posh BrasÃlia – Distrito Federal is a lot larger, unequal and uglier. ever heard of something called “Ãguas Claras”, some 20 km away from the “airplane”? It’s a concrete ode to human stupidity and imobiliary speculation.
It kinda hurts to say something like that, I was born and bred in BrasÃlia, but it’s a place with no future. zero urban mobility, everything too expensive and paid by a bureaucratic elite, while the rest of the population suffers with no quality jobs, leisure, transport or good places to live… it’s better to realize that as soon as possible and find a way out than spend the rest of your life believing in some “JK” common sense, stuff like “this is the city of the future” while everything falls apart, and gets more and more expensive.
I too lived in BrasÃlia for 3 years and in Belo Horizonte and I completely agree with Gustavo Noronha two posts above.
Want a example of why?
In Brasilia it is prohybited by law to open a pharmacy outside the pharmacy sector.
Everything in “sectorized” there. Seems organized at first sigth but when you start to live there, you see the problems.
If you need a medicine.. well.. be prepared to take your car, drive some kilometers to go to the pharmacy sector, buy you medicine and get back.
There cant have restaurants in any place. There is designeted places for it.
There is the hotel sectors… the hospital sectors.. shopping sectors..and so on.
Again, in theory appear to be organized but in practice is a mess. Whitout a car (even with it) it is damn hard to buy a medicine, buy some toys and bread for the next break-fast. (here you go, about 10km to do this 3 stuffs. Seryously)
Now living in São Paulo for 2 years after 28 living in Brasilia I can honestly say, in São Paulo you must walk, apart from traffic jams just the parking problems already make you rethink the idea of having a car. Brasilia was made thinking about the car, it was the booming of the car and road transport in Brazil.
But even so I used to walk a lot in BrasÃlia, but was I don’t think in walk to in São Paulo (8km distance) I did not think about walk to work in Brasilia (10 km). On the Monumental scale the empty distances are enormous, but its the reason of this scale, on the other 3 scales of Brasilia its not rare to see people walking.
Hey LuÃs Eduardo, stop the bullshit. Of course there are pharmacies, restaurants, bakeries everywhere, although there are some stuff that can’t be everywhere, like hotels.
it’s amazing how there are people who try to defend and justify the crappy architecture of Brasilia, it was built by huge stupid egos as if being an art exposition in the open
most of the people who like it here either:
a) have enough and more money to be able to live entirely in a bubble oblivious to the reality around them (and Brasilia is very apt in providing illusions for whoever can pay for them);
b) were so poor elsewhere they immigrated here to live less poorly;
c) are tourists with eyes only for its beauties and willing to spend money to avoid the reality of the masses;
even so, Brasilia is quite peculiar and interesting, it’s culture is a wide mix of Brazil’s (with a stronger tone of the north/northeast), due to becoming such a big city in such a short time (no more than 2 adult generations)
I think it’s a city everyone (specially every brazilian) should know, if nothing else to learn from all the mistakes; I don’t want to live here much longer anyway (being here for almost 3 years already)
How about cycling in Brazil? Has somebody tried it?
Thank you for the link to the documentary. I feel like both of them have a point. BrasÃlia is a place made of contrast. I went there twice and every time I was astonished by the cultural diversity and how it applied to the architecture. Oscar Niemeyer is a great architect, his buildings are very nice to look at, especially the Ministry of External Relations and Palácio da Alvorada. On the other note, I really like the Brazil’s Civic Square by Burle Max. However, Jan Gehl made a great point. Now I think about it, I see that it really feels a bit too cold and distant. USA and Canada architecture is similar to this not really consistent style. With the minimum of historical buildings, we tried to fill that void with modern architecture. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. Some did great, I can’t vote against Wright, but many of the others are questionable. I did the research where I tried to find the best examples and unfortunately I ended up the other way, with the ugliest ones. Modern architecture can easily go overboard. With design, with decorations, or when it simply wants to appeal too much.