The original housing concept of the Pilot Plan proposed oversized blocks of mixed-use, low-rise buildings, which form a “superquadra”. Each of these blocks was meant to provide the community with basic services. This failing to happen, people began adopting their own living strategies. Such was the case along the city’s body of water, Paranoá Lake. Today luxurious houses, though never planned, occupy its entire shore. It’s hard to accept the unplanned satellite communities, but also hard to accept the gentrification of this idealized city.
     The legacy of Brasilia is not only for Brazil, it’s for everyone, because the realization of this city is a perfect reckoning of the thought and the spirit of one particular historical age. That age is European Modernism, and Brasilia embodies it in all aspects: formalism, hierarchical circulation, programmed sectors, and the shift from human scale to machine (automobile) scale. Even the outline of the city’s plan, the crossing of two axes, was realized in the form of an airplane. Modernism was displaced long ago, but Brasilia remains — and lives. It was created by professionals with a clear belief in the optimism of a new time, a functional way of life, and a more united population.