Brasilia - Pilot Design for the Modern Age, Brazil (33/418)

Brasilia, a capital created ex nihilo in the centre of the country in 1956, is a landmark in the history of town-planning. Urban planner Lucio Costa and architect Oscar Niemayer intended that everything, from the layout of the residential and administrative districts -often compared with the shape of a bird - to the symmetry in the buildings themselves, should reflect the harmonious design of the city, in which the official buildings are strikingly imaginative.