Design me a city - Brasilia

Brasilia was designed as a modern 'purpose built' city in response to a design competition in 1957 to develop a geographically central capital for Brasil. The winning entry was designed by Lucio Costa + is based on the ideal of a 'functional city'. Oscar Niemeyer designed many of the iconic buildings for the capital centre. The modernist + highly symbolic architecture, coupled with the almost utopian city design delivers a city that appears strangely out of touch with the scale of the human inhabitants. The city as a whole appears as an overt symbol of political + government power + man vs nature - of course the architecture is beautiful, but it seems somehow alien. Is a design such as this really functional in relation to the daily needs inhabitants + the necessities of everyday life in a city?

Obscenely over-scaled + desolate public open spaces, such as The Square of Three Powers only serve to demonstrate the lack of understanding that many modernist designers of the day had of the essential human dimension that is so vital to the success of urban design, buildings + landscapes everywhere.

Perhaps I'm too critical of what what obviously an innovative + unique design that was a product of an age of design + architectural exploration - only time will reveal the problems of this functional + utopian design.

Image of The Supreme Federal Tribunal, Brasilia from Wikipedia.