Beetween years that coincide with the Estado Novo (1937-1945), the city of Rio de Janeiro, at that time Federal District, passed by serveral and deep urban reforms that would transform it in a monumental way. They were promoted by Henrique Dodsworth trough Comissão do Plano da Cidade, an organ tied directly to Secretaria de Viação e Obras. The interventions were in order to promote the modernization of the city, treated as a simple projection, in a bigger scale, of the present into the future. Its justification was based by the apropriation of the urbanism’s precepts as a legitimate and scientific speech of the City. On the other hand, Dodsworth constructed a political memory that linked him to a mayor’s tradition back to Pereira Passos in a thechnicist bias and, in this way, he also applied for overlaping the national sphere to the local one, the Federal District to the city. The present work intends to analyse the Rio de Janeiro of Henrique Dodsworth by the prism of a doble intervention, political and urbanistic ones, and it tries to capture its effects in the carioca’s urbs dynamic.