BREATHING NEW LIFE INTO BRASÍLIA
LÚCIO MONTIEL was the third child ever to be born in Brasília’s Base Hospital. It was 1960, and after four years of construction, the city had just formally opened as the centre of Brazilian bureaucracy. Montiel’s parents, like so many others from across the country, had chosen to arrive early, leaving the then-capital, Rio de Janeiro, to take part in this wildly optimistic experiment—a Modernist fantasia of a city willed into existence by the leftist president Juscelino Kubitschek, the architect Oscar Niemeyer, and the visionary city planner Lúcio Costa, the man after whom Lúcio Montiel was named.
Today, Montiel works as a guide for the city and surrounding region. He met me on a bright blue morning in February, before
