Italian architect Carlo Ratti has designed a masterplan for a high-tech innovation district in Brasília that will be an extension to the Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer-designed city.
The one-million-square-metre district called BIOTIC will be located at the northern tip of the Brasília UNESCO World Heritage site on a triangular plot of land near to the city's National Park.
Designed as a high-tech innovation hub, Ratti's development is intended to solve some of the issues caused by the fragmentation of activities in Brasília, which was arranged by urban planner Costa and architect Niemeyer in 1955.
"The first time I visited Brasília, a friend and long-time city resident told me a long-standing joke: 'You know what the problem of Brasília is" The district of cafes is far away from the district of sugar'," Ratti explained. "In short, a key issue lies with the lack of mixed-use and with the strictly functional subdivision of the city according to modernist principles ? which we are aiming to overcome with our plan."
BIOTIC will be an extension of Brasília
BIOTIC will include the four urban scales that Costa defined in the plan of Plano Piloto, or Pilot Project, as residential, monumental, gregarious and bucolic.
Unlike the original design, it will integrate them with each other rather than keeping them separate.
"Brasília is a fascinating metropolis: a monumental axis and two wings that captivate you when you look at it from the plane,&qu...