Building Brasilia

An architect by training and an enthusiast of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, photographer Marcel Gautherot was close to an elite group of Brazilian modernist architects such as Oscar Niemeyer and Roberto Burle Marx. Aesthetic and political affinities made him Niemeyer’s photographer of choice, and Gautherot had privileged access to all stages of the building of Brasilia, Brazil’s new capital and a landmark of modernist architecture and urbanism. This book brings together for the first time a large corpus of Gautherot’s work on the city, selected out of the 3,000 photographs now in the collection of the Moreira Salles Foundation in Rio de Janeiro. Gautherot’s sharp, precise, almost clinical eye captures Brasilia as both promising and ominous, tremendous and fragile, heroic and problematic.

The essays are by Kenneth Frampton, Graduate School of Architecture, Columbia University; and Sergio Burgi of the Instituto Moreira Salles in Rio de Janeiro. 190 photographs