The idea of moving the capital away from the coast had been in the first republican constitution of 1891. The Brazilian government appointed astronomer Luiz Cruls that same year to lead an exploration commission into the Central Highlands: doctors, geologists, botanists, mapping topography and climate and soils across what became known as the Quadrilateral Cruls. The commission presented its findings in 1894, and nothing happened. A 1922 commission revisited the question, picked a location in Goias, and nothing happened again. The project lingered for 60 more years until Juscelino Kubitschek, running for president in 1955, promised to build the capital. Elected, he did it. He signed the law creating the urbanization company Novacap in September 1956. Construction started that November. Forty-one months later, the government moved.

A public competition chose the pilot plan of architect Lucio Costa, whose design laid out the city in the shape of a cross that reads, from the air, as an airplane or a bird. The Monumental Axis running east-west hosts the government buildings: the National Congress with Oscar Niemeyer's twin white towers and the inverted dome of the Senate chamber, the Planalto Palace of the Presidency, the Supreme Court, and the ministries marching in identical boxes along the central mall. The residential wings run north and south along curving roads, laid out in superquadras, standardized blocks with apartment buildings on columns and green space beneath. Niemeyer designed most of the major civic structures, including the Metropolitan Cathedral with its sixteen curved pillars forming a crown of stained glass, inaugurated in 1970. Costa and Niemeyer and structural engineer Joaquim Cardozo executed a vision of modernist urbanism that UNESCO eventually designated a World Heritage Site.

The workers who built Brasilia came mostly from Goias, Minas Gerais, and the impoverished Northeast. They were called candangos, a word that originally meant something closer to outsider or riffraff but was reclaimed as a badge of pride. They lived in temporary camps, worked on incredible schedules, and most of them stayed on after the construction ended, forming the first generations of Brasilienses. Today a sculpture by Bruno Giorgi called Os Candangos stands in the Praca dos Tres Poderes, two abstract figures in dark bronze, representing the laborers whose sweat made the city possible. Thirty thousand of them working for 41 months is a staggering figure, and the pace of the work was inhuman by later standards. Whatever else Brasilia is, it is a monument to their effort.

The Federal District covers about 5,800 square kilometers, more than double the size of the city of Tokyo and slightly larger than Rhode Island. Most of it is cerrado, the Brazilian savanna that rolls across the central plateau at altitudes between 600 and 1,100 meters. The artificial Paranoa Lake, almost 40 square kilometers, was dug to moderate the intense dryness of the winter season, when humidity can drop to critical levels and fires burn readily. The service sector dominates the economy at 92.5 percent of GDP, reflecting the bureaucratic character of a government capital. Per-capita GDP in the Federal District is the highest in Brazil, driven by federal salaries, and the district accounts for about 3.7 percent of the Brazilian economy despite its small size. The population is around 2.4 million, concentrated in Brasilia and its satellite administrative regions. Politics here are distinguished: 24 district deputies in the Legislative Chamber, eight seats in the federal Chamber of Deputies, three in the Senate, and regional administrators appointed by the governor rather than elected. The compact geography concentrates power in a way no other Brazilian state or city matches.

At the end of Niemeyer's Monumental Axis stands the Praca dos Tres Poderes, the Three Powers Square, where the Planalto Palace of the Presidency, the National Congress, and the Supreme Court face one another. A 286-square-meter Brazilian flag flies from a 100-meter triangular pole in the plaza, and the Panteao da Patria honors national heroes. This is the ceremonial center of Brazil, where inaugurations happen, where impeachment votes are announced, where protesters gather in the hundreds of thousands during political crises. On January 8, 2023, rioters loyal to defeated president Jair Bolsonaro stormed all three buildings in an echo of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, breaking windows and smashing furniture before security forces restored order. The incident reminded Brazilians that Costa's pristine modernist vision, the capital raised from nothing in 41 months, was now a building like any other capital, vulnerable to the same forces that test democracies everywhere.