A Machine to Live in

The setting is Brasilia, the Brazilian capital built from scratch between 1956 and 1960 using the urban planning project of Lúcio Costa under the supervision of Oscar Niemeyer, the architect of almost all the buildings, while Roberto Burble Marx designed the public spaces. Brasilia shares its name with an asteroid discovered by a French astronomer at the end of the 19th century. The documentary has a sci-fi structure and flavour, and compares architecture to alternative cosmologies, with the utopian and abstract city, a manifest expression of Brazilian modernism, having always appealed to cosmo-futurists and spiritualists. The film provides a semiology of the porous architecture loaded with meaning for new visions of the future.