Brazilians are noted for city building- flamboyant, primitive, exciting, stylish cities. This book captures the spirit of the building process well as its results in Brazil's old and new capital cities. The romantic magic of Rio de Janeiro's dramatic setting, and the different vision of Brasilia's dramatic, white buildings, rising above a vast, empty plain. Through a methodical, historically sequenced narrative, one is enticed to understand what really happened in the evolution of the two cities. A major part of the book concerns the planning and building process in Brasilia, and includes the various runner-up plans produced by the international competition for the design of the new Brazilian capital in the 1950s. The author has undertaken the task of explaining the processes and products of Brazil's built environment in terms of complex and idiosyncratic cultural attitudes. Rio and Brasilia, via the startling mixture of stark modernity, rampant Baroque, and indigenous clutter which express the nature of the cities and the people of Brazil, capture some unique aspects of the Latin soul.