The superblocks that characterize Brasilia’s urban fabric are defined by Lucio Costa, a posteriori, as the “residential scale” of the city: a play on words that obscures a proper understanding of how the housing mass of the Brazilian capital is structured. In order to perceive more clearly the relations of scale — in its conventional, that is, geometric, sense — in the superblock, we begin by addressing the contradictions inherent in the spatial and discursive abstraction of modernism. From there, we analyze the scale relationships in Brasilia’s residential area according to three successive scopes: the scale articulations around its neighborhood unit, the elements of spatial composition in the superblock, and the role buildings play in actualizing the scales and spatial relations peculiar to this city’s urbanism. At each step, we note how the interpretive categories put forward by several scholars of Brasilia and of modern architecture come together, in their clarifications as well as contradictions, with the abstraction and spatial ambiguity of the superblock. The complex, thus made indivisible, of spaces and discourses upholds the paradigm of modern dwelling, yet this comes at the price of erecting a system of conceptual deceptions.