Brasília was created in Brazil's interior as the culmination of a long national ambition to move the capital away from the Atlantic coast. President Juscelino Kubitschek made construction a central promise of his development program after taking office in 1956. Lúcio Costa won the competition for the urban plan in 1957, and Oscar Niemeyer designed the principal civic buildings. Engineers, administrators, artists, and tens of thousands of migrant laborers known as candangos transformed the plateau at extraordinary speed before inauguration on 21 April 1960.

Costa's Plano Piloto organized the city around two crossing axes. The Monumental Axis carried ministries, cultural institutions, and the seats of government, while the curved residential axis contained superquadras, or superblocks, with apartments set in open landscape near schools and services. Road separation and generous space reflected modernist planning and an automobile-centered future. Niemeyer's sculptural concrete forms gave institutional identity to the Cathedral, National Congress, Planalto Palace, Supreme Federal Court, and Itamaraty Palace, supported by landscape designs associated with Roberto Burle Marx.

The new capital shifted federal administration inland and became a symbol of modernization, national integration, and confidence. Yet its social geography exposed tensions within the ideal plan. Laborers who built the monumental center often lived in provisional settlements and later satellite cities beyond the protected core. Distance, unequal services, and dependence on cars challenged the promise of an egalitarian city. Military government after 1964 occupied the same civic spaces, while later democratic ceremonies and protests gave the planned ensemble meanings its designers could not fully control.

UNESCO inscribed Brasília in 1987, unusually soon after its construction, recognizing the scale and coherence of its modernist urban experiment. Brazil's heritage authorities protect the Plano Piloto, major views, building forms, and open-space relationships. Preservation must address aging concrete, alterations, traffic, development pressure, and the needs of a living metropolitan population. The government buildings damaged during the attacks of 8 January 2023 required conservation and restoration, adding a new episode to their continuing political life.

Brasília is not only a collection of Niemeyer landmarks or a plan shaped like an airplane. Its historical meaning comes from the coordination of architecture, landscape, circulation, housing, and state symbolism, as well as from the communities and inequalities that grew around that system. Much of the central fabric remains close to the 1960 design, while use and metropolitan scale have changed radically. Protecting the city requires preserving spatial ideas without freezing ordinary life, and remembering the candangos alongside the leaders and designers whose names dominate its official story.