ArchDaily Explores Fordlândia, Brasília, and Ciudad Guayana as Planned Cities

Key facts

• The article was written by Daniela Andino and published on October 6, 2026, as part of ArchDaily's topic The Lure of Escapism in Architecture and Alternative Worlds.
• Fordlândia was established in the late 1920s by Henry Ford on the Tapajós River in the Brazilian Amazon to produce rubber and replicate a Michigan-style town.
• Fordlândia's rubber trees were ruined by blight, and in December 1930 a dining-hall protest escalated into a riot that forced managers to flee to boats.
• Brasília was built inland under President Juscelino Kubitschek; Lúcio Costa won the 1957 urban plan competition, and the city was inaugurated in 1960.
• Costa described the Plano Piloto as two axes crossing at right angles, 'the very sign of the cross,' organizing superquadras and the Monumental Axis with Oscar Niemeyer buildings.
• Construction workers known as candangos, many from Brazil's Northeast, were largely relocated to satellite towns including Taguatinga and Ceilândia, founded in 1971.
• Ciudad Guayana was planned in southeastern Venezuela in the early 1960s by the Corporación Venezolana de Guayana with MIT and Harvard's Joint Center for Urban Studies.
• By 1962, around 20,000 people lived in self-built settlements in Ciudad Guayana, and Donald Appleyard's resident mapping showed daily routes absent from the official plan.