Brasília II, 2019

Sixteen years after my first visit, I returned to Brasília to revisit one of the twentieth century’s most ambitious urban projects. While the earlier work focused on the tensions between modernist ideals and scale, this second series concentrates on the relationship between architecture and its inhabitants.

Designed by Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, Brasília is defined by vast distances, monumental government buildings and carefully planned residential sectors. Walking through the city today, one becomes aware of the contrast between the human body and the oversized spaces created by modernist planning. People appear small against the monumental architecture, while daily life unfolds in ways that often diverge from the intentions of the original plan.

The photographs explore this relationship between individual and city, examining how inhabitants occupy, adapt and navigate an environment conceived according to abstract architectural and political ideals. Nearly sixty years after its inauguration, Brasília remains a unique urban landscape where utopian ambitions and everyday experience continue to coexist.

This return visit forms part of an ongoing photographic investigation into planned cities and urban visions, including Chandigarh in India and Astana in Kazakhstan.