Lúcio Costa won the competition for the Pilot Plan of Brasília in 1957; Oscar Niemeyer designed almost everything that stands on it, and this is the building that stands at the head of the Monumental Axis. It is legible from a kilometre away, in three shapes and with no ornament at all. A low glazed slab holds the offices and the committee rooms; on its roof sit two thin concrete shells, a dome over the Senate and an upturned open bowl over the Chamber of Deputies. Between them rise two twenty-eight-storey towers faced in white marble and joined at mid-height by a bridge. The building opened with the city on 21 April 1960, and English Wikipedia describes the new capital as one of the largest adoptions of Modernism in a single project to the present day. Brasília was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987.
Brasília was built in a little over three years by workers known as candangos. Portuguese Wikipedia records that they arrived mostly from the North and Northeast of Brazil on open pau-de-arara trucks, and were housed in camps run by the construction companies — Candangolândia, nicknamed Lonalândia because its shacks were roofed in tarpaulin, Vila Planalto, and the Cidade Livre. Both the camps and the workers' contracts were treated as temporary by the administration: no plots were sold beyond the initial plan, and masonry building was forbidden in the camps to reinforce the transience of the housing. Lúcio Costa's own Pilot Plan report stated that "we must prevent the encysting of favelas both on the urban and on the rural periphery." Satellite towns including Ceilândia, Taguatinga and Samambaia followed, and, in the same article's words, many candangos "were removed" to them. The word candango itself comes from Kimbundu, entered Brazil with the culture of enslaved people, and was at first a slur.
Wikidata Q4155889 · Commons: Imagens de Brasília - Fachada do Palácio do Congresso Nacional (53457677994).jpg · Photo: Pedro França/Agência Senado · Licence: CC BY 2.0