Still thousands of miles away, you nonetheless feel a little closer to Brazil when you're in Portugal. The two countries share much of their history, share their language and more. Recently, at Primavera Sound in Porto, Kings of Convenience thanked the Portuguese for their part in creating Brazil's beloved Bossa Nova music (though that may have been clutching at straws...)
I recently came across the photography of Vincent Fournier over on Collate. Fournier has done a number of photo series', but the one that stood out for me was his series of very atmospheric photographs of Brasília, the capital city of Brazil, designed and built between 1956 and 1960 and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Brasília is the world's largest city not to have existed before the 20th century and was planned by Lúcio Costa with Oscar Niemeyer as chief architect and Roberto Burle Marx as landscape designer. It was conceived as far back as 1827 to create a new capital for the country, slightly more centrally-located than the previous capital - Rio de Janeiro - and away from the densely populated south-east coast of the country. Apparently a vision of a futuristic city sited where Brasília is now appeared in a dream of Italian saint Don Bosco in 1883. Spooky...
Brasília is a city I'd really like to visit. Though not considered particularly well planned (everything's really spaced out, so you need a car to get anywhere) it's nonetheless full of incredible looking architecture, and it would be fascinating to ... well, not wander but travel around a city built from scratch only 50 or so years ago. Looking out my Lisbon kitchen window at a mess of red rooftops, each built at any time in the last few hundred years along meandering streets almost squashed together, perhaps the distance between these places is quite vast after all...
I recently came across the photography of Vincent Fournier over on Collate. Fournier has done a number of photo series', but the one that stood out for me was his series of very atmospheric photographs of Brasília, the capital city of Brazil, designed and built between 1956 and 1960 and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Brasília is the world's largest city not to have existed before the 20th century and was planned by Lúcio Costa with Oscar Niemeyer as chief architect and Roberto Burle Marx as landscape designer. It was conceived as far back as 1827 to create a new capital for the country, slightly more centrally-located than the previous capital - Rio de Janeiro - and away from the densely populated south-east coast of the country. Apparently a vision of a futuristic city sited where Brasília is now appeared in a dream of Italian saint Don Bosco in 1883. Spooky...
Brasília is a city I'd really like to visit. Though not considered particularly well planned (everything's really spaced out, so you need a car to get anywhere) it's nonetheless full of incredible looking architecture, and it would be fascinating to ... well, not wander but travel around a city built from scratch only 50 or so years ago. Looking out my Lisbon kitchen window at a mess of red rooftops, each built at any time in the last few hundred years along meandering streets almost squashed together, perhaps the distance between these places is quite vast after all...
(Images via 1 & 2 | 3 | 4 | 5)
