8/3/2023 0 Comments Lucio utopiaToday, Ceilandia, a satellite town in the greater city center designed to house these workers, contains the community of Sol Nascente, one of the largest slums in Latin America. However, the city’s very construction catalyzed the formation of Brasilia’s first favelas, as impoverished workers were forced to live in temporary settlements outside the city center. The capital’s founders hoped that Brasilia would become the first Brazilian city without favelas, or shantytowns, on urban peripheries built without regulation. This suburban ring arose without any overarching plan, and Costa’s balance between architecture and nature is nonexistent in these areas. The vast majority of the city’s residents, including the bulk of the working class, live in 27 satellite towns surrounding the city center. Costa’s Plano Piloto was designed for 500,000 people, but currently, Brasilia’s metro area has nearly 5 million inhabitants. Today, Brasilia deals with many of the same challenges as other Brazilian cities: unchecked sprawl, a shortage of affordable housing and congestion. In the span of half a century, Brasilia’s novel design went from futuristic to antiquated. Although Brasilia’s designers considered car-centric urban planning to be futuristic, this planning is not compatible with sustainable urban design, which often features walkable, public transit-oriented urban planning. Today, Brasilia is plagued by urban sprawl and class inequality, as most of the metro area’s residents live in lower-income satellite cities surrounding the capital. Unfortunately, Costa’s utopian dream has not been fully realized. Brasilia’s designers hoped to create an egalitarian city which could be inhabited by government ministers and blue-collar workers alike. The city was designed around urban planner Lucio Costa’s airplane-shaped “Plano Piloto.” A series of residential “superquadras” along the plane’s wings contained dwellings, hospitals and schools and were connected to government buildings in the airplane’s cockpit through central highways. (Oct.Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, completed its construction in 1960 with the intent of using modernist architecture as a tool to forge a futuristic utopian society. More engineer than philosopher during his career, the artist%E2%80%99s legacy finally reaches an audience deserving of his contribution to modern art, and White%E2%80%99s expressive conclusions explore conceptualism with admirable depth and clarity. Relations with contemporaries%E2%80%94Jackson Pollock, Yves Klein, and Cy Twombly%E2%80%94ranged from amiable to resentful. Informed by Walter Benjamin in his deductions, White relates each chapter to the %E2%80%9Cdialectical structure in Fontana%E2%80%99s work,%E2%80%9D citing political events, abstract notions, and cultural shifts as influential in the anachronistic relationship Fontana had with art. Fontana%E2%80%99s slashed canvases, gaudy palette, and penchant for heavily applied acrylic meant his work was greeted with at best indifference, at worst disdain. Pinpointing Fontana%E2%80%99s first and only solo New York show in 1961 at age 62 as the realization of a lifelong dream, White wonderfully explores topics including: avant-garde paradoxes the pastiche of Dada, Surrealism, and Russian Constructivism and Fontana%E2%80%99s desire to be distanced from European Informel and Tachiste artists. Collating and critiquing the work of Italian-Argentine artist Lucio Fontana (1899-1968), University of Melbourne lecturer White provides a fresh interpretation of a man whose innovation and insurgency is now demanding greater recognition and record prices more than 40 years after his death.
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