In November 1984, Lucio Costa – the architect who designed Brasília Pilot Plan – became impressed with the urban vitality of the Bus Station Platform. Initially designed as infrastructure for articulating road flows between the new capital and other cities and states, the Platform had then already become a form of intermodal articulation of the Pilot Plan with the satellite cities. For such reasons, the Platform had become a point of urban life animation in the city, taken as a place of permanence and conviviality for those in transit, in displacements and flows of the Pilot Plan. The reality found by Lucio Costa in the 1980s was already quite different from what he had imagined, but this urban activity also contrasts with the images of desolation and isolation that are related to Brasília. The city also has other stigmas, among them the one that stands out it is a city made only for the automobile. However, throughout its 60 years, Brasília Pilot Plan can no longer be sustained by such simplifications. Brasília's urban ordinary life presents the typical dynamics of Brazilian cities, with cycles of success and decay of spaces and human activities in their territories, resulting from the very overwhelming social, cultural, economic and technological transformations that occurred in the last decades. The Bus Station Platform is a strategic project of great dimensions, which is located at the ideal point of intersection between the Monumental Axis and the Highway-Residential Axis. The spatial complexity of the Platform must be understood within the limits of its architectural and urban design. The 700m-long superstructure is configured by means of a set of surfaces and slabs that are superimposed between different levels, to organize the automotive racetrack bundles for vehicle circulation. The arrangement between surfaces and slabs also organizes spaces and urban environments, in order to establish physical
149