Sixty years of Brasília housing: transformations and contradictions of blocks 700 in the Pilot Plan.
Brasília, Pilot Plan, modern architecture, housing.
The proposed thesis project aims to analyze the transformations of the blocks 700 of Brasilia's Pilot Plan over its six decades of existence. Although listed and inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list, Brasilia faces contradictions between the preservation of its historical heritage and the development dynamics typical of any city. These contradictions are more easily observed in sectors where the legal instruments of ordering and preservation do not have the same rigidity as those contemplated, from the beginning, by the four urban scales proposed by Lucio Costa. Therefore, this research aims to analyze the origin, motivations, and results of these transformations in the two residential sectors of South Wing and North Wing whose predominant typology is the house and whose urban and architectural forms are closer to what is observed in other localities of the Federal District, when comparing with the superblocks. The research also seeks to understand how the hierarchical view of what – and how much – to preserve is reflected in the legislation and norms created for the protection of the city's heritage and how the implementation of these rules affected urban development and architectural interventions in the area under study. All these are important questions to help understand urban planning and historic preservation in contexts of accelerated urban development.