Lucio Costa Archive on Display at Casa da Arquitetura

At Casa da Arquitetura, the exhibition Lucio Costa Archive is drawn from the personal collection of Lucio Costa, handed over by the family to the institution in 2021, and offers a broad reading of the life and work of the Brazilian urban planner and architect.

Curated by Ana Vaz Milheiro, the exhibition is organized into six sections — Famíla, Escritos, Portugal, Plano Piloto, Brasília and Desenho — and brings together documents, images and other materials that help reveal both the private sphere and the public trajectory of Lucio Costa. Among the central highlights are the trips made to Portugal between the 1940s and 1960s, partly recorded in the Bloquinhos de Portugal, and the original drawings of the Plano Piloto de Brasília, little shown in Europe.

The exhibition frames this body of work as an invitation to reflect on Lucio Costa’s legacy and its impact on modern architecture, linking it to current questions about motivations, influences and urban transformation. The exhibition also forms part of the celebrations of two hundred years of diplomatic relations between Portugal and Brazil and was accompanied, at the opening, by the launch of two publications devoted to the same archive.