Brasilia, capital of Brazil, was inaugurated on April 21, 1960. The city was planned and built during 1956–1960, drawing upon the greatest minds the nation had to offer in terms of architecture, planning, landscaping, and construction: names like Oscar Niemeyer, Lúcio Costa, and Roberto Burle Marx.
Swiss photographer René Burri had been capturing subjects as diverse as Le Corbusier’s work, Picasso in his home, and Argentine gauchos when he found himself flying to Brazil to document the city as it rose from the ground with astonishing pace. He photographed the area from its earliest days as a near-untouched wilderness, through months of gargantuan construction, and documented its completion and revelation as a treasure of modernist architecture and a focal point for Brazilian optimism. As Arthur Ruegg, professor in architecture and construction, wrote in his essay ‘Rene Burri’s Journeys to Brasilia’, “Scarcely any other twentieth-century monument is more spectacular and more photogenic.”
