When I was about ten years old, I used to design cities. It was very easy, and I was surprised that everyone before me had made such a hash of it. I could conclude only that the world had hitherto been populated by fools. At the very center of the city was the parliament building, which was like St. Peter’s but on a bigger and grander scale. Round it ran an eight-lane circular road, from which radiated, symmetrically, six large avenues. How the deputies to the parliament were supposed to reach it—dodge between the traffic, I suppose—was not a question with which I concerned myself. I was designing cities and buildings, not human convenience. Along the avenues were situated the institutions that I then considered essential for cities: the natural history museum, the art gallery, the royal palace. Everything was on a grand scale, and no mess of the kind created by commercial or other inessential establishments was permitted or planned for.

Brasilia was being built while I designed my cities, though in a different architectural vocabulary: one of reinforced concrete rather than marbled neoclassical façades. From the point of view of urban design and planning, however, it was not much of an advance over mine, but, unlike my designs, it was put into practice.

The first thing to say about Brasilia is that it is an astonishing achievement or feat, and this is so whether you think