This brutalist concrete dovecote, designed by Oscar Niemeyer in 1961, is sited on the Praça dos Três Poderes (“Three Powers Plaza”) in Brazilia, where the National Congress, Supreme Federal Court and Presidential Palace are all located. It seems at first a strange structure to include at the centre of national power, but the tradition of building elaborate structures to keep pigeons and doves dates back to Ancient Egypt and Persia, where they were prized for their eggs, flesh, and fertilising dung. This tradition continued in Europe, where the possession of a dovecote became a status symbol: in Ancien Régime France only nobles were granted the privilege to keep doves.
Since Noah, the dove has been associated with hope, peace and freedom of the spirit, appropriately symbolic for a democratic capital, but Niemeyer’s inclusion of a dovecote here may also have been a form of one-upmanship on Le Corbusier. For while the latter had designed a sculptural open-hand-as-dove motif at Chandigarh, here it is real doves that animate (and mark/splatter) the plaza with their presence, while physically the dovecote’s textured concrete form, like an inversion of a Brancusi endless column, punctuates the open expanse of the plaza like an exclamation mark. I (rgw)
Photo: © Leonardo Finotti
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