It was the most important commission that an architect has had ever received. Oscar Niemeyer was to build a city for 500,000 people in the red dust of an uninhabited landscape. He was to conquer empty space. To an architect, Brasilia was what the moon landing meant to the astronauts. The planning of Brasilia was one of the great utopias of the 20th century. The dream settled in the image of a city. Brasilia’s children must think all cities are designed according to aircraft blueprints. Here, human beings seem lost on the expansive squares, but also somehow significant among the beautiful, powerful buildings that Niemeyer constructed. First-time visitors to Brasilia are stunned and have to learn to orientate themselves from scratch because the city is like nowhere else they have ever been. Finally, one grasps the immeasurable influence of architecture upon a human being’s inner sense of harmony.

The year was 1955. At the high point of the modernist era and belief in the inevitability of progress, Juscelino Kubitschek , ‘JK’, became President of Brazil. Kubitschek had a crazy plan. Here, in the middle of noman’s- land, Brazil was to be centralised, populated and catapulted into the First World. It was a plan with all the presumption of a dictator. It was also evidence of an audacious ardour for life. Kubitschek had known Niemeyer since the early 1940s when, as mayor of Pampulha, he had commissioned him to construct a new suburb for the city. Today, it sounds like a script out of a road movie: Kubitschek, now President, out driving with Niemeyer, leans over to him and says: “This time, Oscar, we’re going to build the capital of Brazil. A modern capital, the most beautiful capital city in the world.” So, together with the city-planner Lucio Costa, the then 48-year-old architect set about building ‘the most beautiful capital city of the world’. How did they conceive the future? Or, better said, what was it about the present that they wanted to escape from? Their aircraft-like ground plan, ‘Plano Piloto’, embodied the idea of order and progress (expressed as ordem e progresso in the Brazilian national flag). Costa divided the life of the city into different sectors (living, working, leisure) and did away with pavements; after all, it was thought then that the people of the future would travel everywhere by car. There would be no crossings either, to prevent traffic jams. Brasilia was the conception of pure urbanism.

Oscar Niemeyer designed the government buildings: white and elegant with their smooth, clean lines, monoliths on the skyline. These sculptural forms were the images that Brasil needed to found its own identity. At the same time, Niemeyer dreamed of transforming his communist ideals into reality: “we thought that society too would be changed, that it would become more equal” said Niemeyer. In the uniform apartment blocks, the government minister would live next to his chauffeur. Brasilia was inaugurated on 21st April 1960. But the very nature of the idyllic Never-Never Land is that it can never be. The Utopia could only fail.

The year 2004: the poor and the families of the workers who helped build Brasilia live in satellite cities ten to fifteen kilometres away. In the high-rises of the ‘Plano Piloto’ live only the upper-middle classes. Niemeyer was already showing his profound disappointment soon after the city was finished. “Terrible things are happening in Brasilia. The poor quarters of the city are forgotten, hidden away and cut off from the capital,” he said. Today, instead of the planned 500,000 people, two and a half million people live there.

Brasilia was the last idyllic promise of the future. Then the heavens darkened; the images were those of Blade Runner and the post-modern had firmly established itself in architecture. Today there is nothing to replace the adventurous lust of the age of the space race. Human beings are not longing to reach out of this world any more; they are retreating into their own bodies. Where is the vision of the future in a strand of DNA? Niemeyer’s modernism is still quoted today in buildings like Gerkan, Marg & Partner’s Tempodrom in Berlin, reminiscent of Brasilia’s Cathedral, or Future Systems’ floating NatWest Media Centre in London. Photographers still flock to Brasilia to illuminate Oscar Niemeyer’s architecture park. Sometimes, these photographs show models, actual people, like in these photos by Gunnar Knechtel – but rarely. Seen from the outside, Brasilia still looks uninhabited.

Oscar Niemeyer’s dream of this city as a model for a fairer world has vanished. Now Niemeyer is a 96-year-old who has worked for the last 60 years out of his office on the Copacabana in Rio. Neil Armstrong did not stay on the moon and Oscar Niemeyer never wanted to live in Brasilia.