Surreal City

The surrealists thought little of architecture, and if it was modernist, even less. For all of them, to whichever faction they belonged, architecture was irrevocably associated with order, with affirmation, and with officialdom – in other words, with most of the things that they hoped to subvert. According to Anthony Vidler, Breton thought that modern architecture was ‘the most unhappy dream of the collective unconscious’, a ’solidification of desire in a most cruel and violent automatism’. ¹ Georges Bataille wrote in 1929 that architecture was simply authoritarian, its forms ‘now the true masters across the land, gathering the servile multitudes in their shadow, enforcing administration and order and constraint’. ² Breton, it is true, saw surrealism as a vehicle of political revolution rather than simply internal contemplation, and his stress on the collective rather than the individual has certain parallels with the ambitions of modernist architects. The experience of the merveilleux was a step towards making a better society, not just an aesthetic game for privileged players. But there was no surrealist programme for architecture, no material measures that compare with Le Corbusier’s imagination of a civilization of the near future in his Plan Voisin, or Ernst May’s Siedlungen at Frankfurt, or the public housing built in Britain after the Second World War. Where the surrealists showed any interest in the city at all, it was never in the fresh or new, but rather the abandoned, ruined or marginal, the places the modern world invariably overlooked. Hence Bataille’s interest in the slaughterhouse ³ – or Breton’s in the underbelly of Paris via the novel Nadja, a tale of wandering in pursuit of a psychotic woman with whom the author was enamoured. Illustrated with odd, deadpan photographs by André Boiffard, Paris appears as an arbitrary collection of fringe sites bearing little relation to the official city of monuments. ⁴ To discuss Brasília in this context might well appear perverse. After all, the post-1960 capital of Brazil is not only modernist in form but monumental in both idea and execution, rigidly geometrical, and much liked by the military. ⁵ But Oscar Niemeyer, the city’s chief architect, wrote of it early on in unmistakably surrealist terms: he hoped it would provide the visitor with ‘an indescribable sense of shock’ that would lift them out of the everyday. ⁶ And the many foreign visitors to the inauguration in April 1960 expressed their own anxieties in the same language. Alienation, shock and estrangement are the key terms, whether the writer is favourable or not. As a discursive phenomenon, Brasília is from the start a profoundly surreal place.