Setor Bancário is located in the armpit of the Southern Wing, right by the Monumental Axis.
Daily, thousands of people walk there from the Central Bus Station and enjoy the view of the twin towers paired with the giant white bowls. If none of that makes sense, maybe you haven’t been to Brasília yet. In that case, allow me to introduce my hometown.
In 1956, the President of Brazil decided to build the new federal capital from scratch in the remote and undeveloped central part of the country. President Juscelino Kubitschek, aka J.K., invited all Brazilian architects to participate in a contest for the best city plan. The winner was the Pilot Plan for Brasília, by Lucio Costa. In four years, Costa’s sketches were transformed into concrete and a massive lake was dammed to embrace the city, creating an urban oasis in the middle of the arid and flat landscape.
The Pilot Plan is a modernist gem that crowned Brasília as a World Heritage site by UNESCO. The plan couldn’t be simpler: it’s a cross following the cardinal directions. The east-west Monumental Axis is crossed by the north-south axis, which is slightly curved like the wings of an airplane or a bird. For that reason, the main neighborhoods of Brasília are called the Northern Wing and the Southern Wing. My grandparents brought the whole family from a small rural village to settle in the new capital that they helped to build. My cousins, my sister and I became part of one of the first generations of north-wingers.
Left: The original sketches presented by Lucia Costa as the Pilot Plan for Brasília, in 1957. Right: Brasília photographed from above in 2017. Credits: Sergey Ryazanskiy/Twitter
Maybe to compensate for the stereotype that Brazilians have of being unorganized and chaotic, Costa laid everything out in sectors. Brasília has the Hospital Sector, the Industrial Sector, the Power Sector… and even the Sector of Mansions of the Southern Lake (yes, we planned for segregation and gentrification). And of course, we have the Bank Sector, or Setor Bancário in Portuguese.
If you’re picturing Setor Bancário as a plaza surrounded by skyscrapers, where businesswomen and men walk anxiously towards the AC in their office because they’re wearing suits in a tropical country, you’re right. Kind of. Yes, the square banks and the equally square bank people are there. But who actually runs the streets of Setor Bancário are the tens, sometimes hundreds, of sweaty, bruised, stoked folks that go there every day to skateboard.
The smooth ledges and platforms of Setor Bancário witnessed me growing up, from an awkward teenager to an anxious young adult. It’s where I learned how to ollie and met some of my closest friends*. We would sit on the doorsteps of the banks to watch the super technical local street skaters, some of which became the best in the world, in awe. Go ahead and google Felipe Gustavo.
The skateboarding community at Setor Bancário. Credit: Anny Caroline.
We used to ask ourselves: how is it possible that they built such a perfect place for skateboarding on accident? Are we sure it wasn’t a skateboarding visionary that snuck this plaza disguised as the Bank Sector in the Pilot Plan? Well, if that was the intention, they forgot to tell the city’s administration. Like anywhere in the world, the government goes to great lengths to undo what urban architects did for skateboarders. They put knobs on ledges, bumps on pavement and security guards everywhere.
Instead of a skateboarding conspiracy, Setor Bancário is very likely to be a case of exaptation. In 1982, the year that my sister was born in Brasília’s Northern Wing, paleontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba published an article saying that, sometimes, evolution can be opportunistic and unpredictable. Many traits that serve a crucial purpose to an organism today may have originated to do a different job. This sidetrack that changes the obvious course of evolution is called exaptation.
A classic example of exaptation is the feather, which probably originated as an adaptation to maintain the body temperature of birds. Much later in the evolutionary scale of birds, feathers became an essential trait for their ability to fly. Setor Bancário is quite literally a feather to the Southern Wing: built to be a modernist plaza dedicated to banks, but “exadapted” to become a world-class street skating spot. Personally, I like the new purpose better.
A photo that is hard to put a caption on. In a way, three human beings that have “exadapted” a public space to make Setor Bancário feel like home. Beautifully captured by Anny Caroline.
But before we conclude that the fate of Setor Bancário went completely off tracks to become a skateboarding mecca, let’s go back to how Brasília was born. President J.K. built the capital to give Brazil a new heart, a core interconnecting all the country’s regions. He says in his book that the main goal of building Brasília was to promote a “true national integration”.
Skateboarders adapt to urban spaces to a point that they almost become one with the landscape. From my experience, they are also very good at welcoming people from all different backgrounds. So, what can be a better example of true integration of a city than a diverse community transforming, and being transformed by, a public space? If Juscelino was the cool, open-minded dude that I like to imagine, he would sit with us to watch skaters landing wallrides right by the bank’s entrance. Smiling with satisfaction, he would brag: “That’s what I built this city for”.
*One of these friends ended up becoming an amazing photographer and gently let me use some of her photos to illustrate this article. Check Anny Caroline’s photography at @annycaarolline, on Instagram.
-Laís
Street art at Setor Bancário. Credit: Anny Caroline.