Lúcio Costa

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Lúcio Costa (February 27, 1902, Toulon, France - June 13, 1998, Rio de Janeiro) was a Brazilian architect and urban planner.

One of the earliest and most important modernist architects in Brazil, Lúcio (alternatively spelled Lucio) Costa became famous for a long career in which he built little, wrote much, and became involved in a number of high-profile controversies.

[edit] Career

Educated in England and Montreux until 1916, he graduated as an architect in 1924 from the School of Fine Art (Escola Nacional de Belas Artes) in Rio de Janeiro. After some early works in the eclectic manner, he adopted Modernism in 1929. In 1930 Costa established a partnership with Russian architect Gregori Warchavchik, and became the Manager of the School of Fine Art. Even though he found students eager to be taught in the "new style," his ruthless administration won him the opposition of the faculty and student body, and Costa eventually had to resign after a year in office. He joined the newly-created SPHAN (Service of National Historic and Artistic Heritage) in 1937 under Rodrigo Melo Franco de Andrade. He remained at the Heritage Service until retirement, acceding to the top post of director, where he was followed by his granddaughter Maria Elisa Costa. During his tenure as regional and then national director, he became involved in many controversial decisions (see #Controversies).

Costa became a figure associated with reconciling traditional Brazilian forms and construction techniques with international modernism, particularly the work of Le Corbusier. With the Brazilian pavilion at the New York World's Fair of 1939 (designed with Oscar Niemeyer), with the Parque Guinle residential complex in Rio of 1948, and with the Hotel do Park São Clemente in Nova Friburgo of 1948, Costa established himself as the pre-eminent figure of Brazilian modernism among architects, although in the public view he is outshined by the sculptural forms of Niemeyer. Among his major works are also the Ministry of Education and Health, in Rio (1936-43), designed with Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer, and Roberto Burle Marx, among others, and the Pilot Plan of Brasília, a competition winner designed in 1957 and mostly built 1958-1960.

[edit] Controversies

During his long tenure as regional, then national chief of the Brazilian Heritage Service, Lucio Costa pushed for a systematic documentation of existing architectural and urbanistic heritage, although he also systematically let his personal preference and political intrigue get in the way of technical assessments. In 1975, he created a public scandal by refusign to sign the landmarking act of Palácio Monroe, the former seat of the Brazilian Senate built in 1906. The building was slated for demolition because of the construction of the subway but, in the face of public and media outcry, the construction company shifted the line to preserve the building. This effort, however, was in vain, since landmark status was denied and a developer razed the building shortly thereafter. Two reasons can be cited for Lucio Costa's contempt for this historically and artistically invaluable structure: one is his typical Modernist abhorrence of eclectic architecture, which was to cause the loss of several other historic buildings in Rio de Janeiro state; the other was the fact that the designer of Palácio Monroe, Souza Aguiar, had a son who had been one of Costa's architectural rivals during their early years. In a more general perspective, Lucio Costa blatantly favored the heritage of the Portuguese colonization over that of any other time or ethnic group (except, of course, over Modernism). Because of this attitude, inculcated also on younger preservationists thanks to Costa's influence in the architecture schools, much of 19th- and early 20th-century architecture, including the architecture of German, Japanese and Italian immigrants, was lost to urban renewal in the sixties and seventies.

Like many architects who achieve extraordinary recognition, Lucio Costa also had little respect for professional ethics. In 1936, when the competition to design the new Ministry of Education and Health was held, the winner was an eclectic design by then-acclaimed architect Arquimedes Memória. Costa used his political connections within the government to scrap the competition result and instead form a new design team headed by himself and no one less than Le Corbusier, with among other members the Roberto Brothers and a young architect who had been Costa's intern, called Oscar Niemeyer. There ensued a disagreement, dragging on for years, between Costa and Le Corbusier—who was not a very ethical professional himself—over who had really been the lead designer on the project.

Lucio Costa is best known for his urban plan for the new capital of Brasília, having won the job in a 1957 public competition. Created from scratch in Brazil's hinterland and 'open for business' in less than three years, Brasilia is both famous and infamous. Costa's Plano Piloto (Pilot Plan) for Brasilia is in the shape of an irregular cross, suggesting an airplane or dragonfly, and is more legible from the sky than from ground level. Costa's own Parque Guinle project was the model for Brasilia's many residential tower-in-a-park superblocks, and Costa specified even the color of the bus drivers' uniforms: dark grey, and with a mandatory cap. Although named as an UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987, the city is notorious for its windswept emptiness and anti-pedestrian layout. Some streets are badly lit because the height and spacing of light standards were not changed with the advent of mercury-vapor bulbs, and World Heritage Site designation has prevented remediation. Most streets have cloverleafs or traffic circles rather than intersections or traffic lights, so cars have no reason to stop. Some pedestrians complain that it is impossible to travel east and west in the city without crossing the axial expressway and risking their lives in underpasses or over the fast cartway. External factors, however, such as a poorly-written decree granting heritage status to the city, the overarching influence of his granddaughter over the city's preservation, and political and technical mismanagement, are very much responsible for the inability to improve the original plan, even as Costa himself called for a flexibilization of guidelines in a document he wrote as the city turned thirty years old, Brasília Revisitada. Costa was responsible for the layout, and Oscar Niemeyer responsible for many of the landmark buildings, and there were disputes between the two afterwards as an article in the landmarking decree specifically exempted works from both of them from review by the Heritage Service.