Arithmetic in Brasilia

For all its soaring architecture and modern planning, Brazil's nine-year-old inland capital, Brasilia, is still more of a collection of government buildings than a metropolis. To help the capital become a city, Brazilian Hotelman Jose Tjurs last week closed a deal to start building a $14 million project, which, when completed by 1976, will be a sort of Latin-style Rockefeller Center -- and Tjurs' biggest holding yet.

Known as the Conjunto Nacional, the center's single six-story building will house offices, five nightclubs, three cinemas, two theaters, underground shops, supermarkets and parking areas. Tjurs (pronounced tih-joors) hopes that the complex will be the shopping and after-hours center of the leisure-shy capital. So anxious is the government for the idea to succeed that it cut the penalty for delays in construction on the fed erally provided land from $1,000,000 to $150,000 a year.

Tjurs doesn't mean to pay a single cruzeiro. The penniless son of immigrants from Russia, he quit school early, went to work at jobs ranging from driving hacks to guiding tours. About all he remembers of his formal education is that "I learned how to add and subtract and multiply." That apparently was enough. Today, at 65, Tjurs has gathered together Brazil's biggest hotel chain; among his six hotels are Rio's 220-room Excelsior Copacabana, Sao Paulo's 17-story Jaragua and the 420-room Nacional in Brasilia. All of this grew from the time when, at age 40, he took the last $1,000 that he had salvaged from a bankrupt Sao Paulo saloon, invested it in a small hotel and with an intuitive taste for food and service, proved himself a born innkeeper--and bookkeeper as well. His worth, at latest reckoning: $30 million.

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