11 Iconic Buildings in Brazil

In the 1950s, under President Juscelino Kubitschek, the capital of Brazil was moved from Rio de Janeiro to Brasília. The new capital was inaugurated in 1960, with the government and legislature moving to their fresh homes, including the new headquarters of the executive: the Planalto Palace. One of three major government buildings built around the Square of the Three Powers, the Planalto Palace is characteristic of Oscar Niemeyer’s work in Brasília.

The vast open spaces and symbolically important buildings encouraged him to design strikingly theatrical architecture, the simplicity of the shape of which only makes it all the more memorable. In the Planalto Palace he places all the functions in a rectangular, glazed box, then raises the box off the ground on a series of balletic buttress columns that reach in to touch their thin fingers on the lowest floor deck, before carrying on up to the roof. Niemeyer had a good understanding of engineering, and elsewhere used it boldly. Here, however, much of the weight is in fact taken by columns hidden under the body of the building. This pretense of impossible engineering is beautiful, but it also makes a political point: Niemeyer’s columns refer to classical architectural tradition, placing Brazil’s government in a long tradition of European governments, but by using the columns to achieve inconceivable structural feats he suggests that Brazil is a modern country that will outdo its colonial founders. Brasília is rare in being a postwar UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it attracts tourists from all over the world to admire Niemeyer’s urban acropolis. (Barnabas Calder)

One of the most important buildings of Brasília, the Metropolitan Cathedral is also one of the most beautiful. Here, Oscar Niemeyer collaborated with Gordon Bunshaft, the leading designer of a major U.S. commercial practice, to produce a cathedral worthy of the capital of such a large, self-confident, and Roman Catholic country.

As with Niemeyer’s other designs for Brasília, the cathedral is remarkably simple. Its more complex functions are hidden underground. Above ground appear only the 16 buttresses, each sweeping up to the small roof in a graceful parabolic curve. Between the buttresses is stretched a web of stained glass that, seen from outside by night, or from the inside by day, presents a vivid expanse of blues and greens.

The concrete supports are obviously modern, and the circular plan is recognizably of its period in the Roman Catholic Church’s thinking about worship spaces. There is also, though, a timeless quality to the cathedral. This comes partly from its abstract simplicity, but also from the echoes of Gothic cathedrals in the sweeping lines of the buttresses. This church looks back to the medieval tradition of daring church engineering and forward to the advanced engineering of its own period. (It was completed in 1970.) From outside, the strong shape is a memorable image. Inside, you are moved by the building’s spacious grandeur and by the extraordinary great window of stained glass stretched over the entire area like the canvas of a tent. (Barnabas Calder)

When the architecture firm Procter-Rihl was approached to design a new house for a retired history lecturer in Porto Alegre, the architects saw it as an opportunity to translate the practice’s vision for cities and urban culture into its first built project.

First, the choice of a marginal, geometrically complex site, 12 feet (3.7 m) wide and 126 feet (38.5 m) long, implicitly demonstrates that no site is too small or too unimportant to be left aside. By treating the residual spaces with the same respect as the more monumental ones, Procter-Rihl was able to inject a sense of urbanity even in a small-scale intervention. An intention to invert traditional preconceptions about urban living is also demonstrated by the internal layout. A number of spatial effects and illusions are played out to enlarge the perception of the spaces. A non-orthogonal grid of partitions morphs the internal rooms, creating spatial variety. In turn this impacts on the prismatic shape of the outer volume and creates a dynamic composition enhanced by cuts to let in light. The final product, completed in 2003, is not only a remarkable example of design for residual spaces but also an architectural and cultural hybrid. (Roberto Bottazzi)

As part of the celebrations for Porto Alegre’s 500th anniversary, several Brazilian artists organized exhibitions in collaboration with foreign art institutions. The Ibere Camargo Foundation took that opportunity to provide the local community with its first museum of contemporary art, which opened in 2007.

Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza won the competition to design the new museum with a bold structure coupling local culture with a European sensibility. The relatively simple program—exhibition spaces, auditorium, bookstore, library and video library, café, offices, and artists’ workshop—is basically split into two separate parts. A long raised platform accommodates all the technical spaces as well as dividing the public area of the building from the adjacent avenue.

The actual museum is a four-story structure positioned at the southwest end of the site and flanked by a tall cliff covered with vegetation. The two walls facing the cliff are straight and almost orthogonal to each other, whereas an irregular complex concrete element closes the figure on the side facing the water. The circulation system of the museum is exposed in the form of three hanging ramps that seem to embrace visitors entering the building through the plaza on the ground level.

Once inside the museum, the drastic separation of galleries and circulation spaces provides a clear hierarchy between the areas of rest and observation of the works on display. Meanwhile, strategic openings are carefully positioned along the ramps to open up views toward the city. Siza’s use of white concrete—frequently utilized in Brazil’s Modernist architecture—augments this elegant building’s sculptural qualities. (Richard Bell)

Brazil’s Ministry of Education and Health, in Rio de Janeiro, was the first of many big Modernist buildings commissioned by a South American government, and it remains one of the best. The original winners of a competition for the building were paid their prize money but then dismissed by the strong-willed minister, Gustavo Capanema, who wanted something more innovative. He appointed Lúcio Costa to the job, and Costa called in his hero Le Corbusier to advise. An ambitious young draftsman in the office, Oscar Niemeyer, was so excited by the contact with Le Corbusier that he would privately trace the master’s sketches in order to teach his hand to produce similar line drawings. Soon Niemeyer had pushed his way up to a role nearly equal to Costa’s in the team.

The ministry, also known as Capanema Palace, is a tall block. High stilts lift it from the ground to open up a street-level piazza in the crowded city; although it later became a cliché of Modernist office blocks, at the time it seemed miraculous to stand such a large building on such slender legs. The other defining feature of the building is its control of sunlight. In the subtropical sun of Rio, offices easily become unbearably hot. To allow breezes in but to also shade the sun-drenched north facade, the architects covered it in a grid of concrete sunshades, of which the vertical fins were fixed and the horizontal ones adjustable.

The impact of this office block was all the greater for its completion in 1943, during World War II, when most of the world had put architecture entirely on hold. It promised a world of scientifically planned, Modernist, beautiful buildings once the war was over. (Barnabas Calder)

Oscar Niemeyer’s many commissions included numerous large-scale projects, among them grand museums, dramatic churches, and vast government buildings. At the smaller scale of this private house for himself, however, he produced what may well be his greatest work.

Indebted to the glass-box houses popularized by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the basic organization of the ground floor is a roof standing on columns, with the interiors minimally separated from the outside world by glazing. But unlike Mies’s houses, Niemeyer’s roof is an irregular and curvy shape, beneath which the glass meanders with equal freedom. The proximity of nature is heightened by boulders from the garden, which come through the windows and into the house, as though the glazing were as insubstantial as a soap bubble.

For all the striking beauty of this house in Rio de Janeiro, which was completed in 1954, comfort is not sacrificed to architectural ideals: the open first floor is the entertaining area, but bedrooms are given privacy and insulation from the heat by being sunk into a basement below, with windows giving glimpses up to the garden. The Canoas House, as it is sometimes known, is not only smaller than most of Niemeyer’s work, it is also less formal. (Barnabas Calder)

Pedregulho Residential Complex in Rio de Janeiro represents a peak of Brazilian Modernism. Up to 1946, Paris-born Affonso Reidy was mainly involved in academic research. Pedregulho gave him a strong presence, not only among Brazilian architects but also as an international designer.

The master plan, which included housing blocks for low-income families, schools, and support services, was commissioned in 1946. Reidy, who worked with Carmen Portinho and Roberto Burle Marx, had to confront the significant size of the program and the topographical constraints of such a rugged site. Through a single, large-scale gesture, he was able to accommodate most of the housing units along the hill in a 853-foot-long (260 m) building that incorporates 272 apartments. In this way, aesthetic concerns and social issues created a spectacular solution.

In section the building is split into two main parts by a long path, which provides access to the various residential units. The open space cutting into the building also brings together all the public spaces and provides a stunning view of the bay. Below this path all the single-bedroom apartments are located, whereas the upper part is occupied by duplex apartments for families to maximize density.

The elevation that faces Rio’s bay emphasizes the horizontality of the intervention with a long brise-soleil (sunshade) in concrete, which is interrupted only by the verticality of the supporting columns. By contrast, the rear elevation employs a simple but quite poetic screening device built with simple bricks that produce a sense of domesticity in a development of otherwise mega-structural scale. Reidy’s design brings together social concerns and a dynamic, almost sensual, formal language. (Roberto Bottazzi)

The dramatic site of this museum, a cliff overlooking the Guanabara Bay, makes the MAC-Niterói a major landmark for those approaching Rio de Janeiro by sea. Designed to house the João Sattamini Collection of Brazilian Contemporary Art, this double curving figure is an example of the search for an identity between the local and the universal, and it is realized on an exuberant Latin American scale.

The MAC-Niterói is one of many structures by Oscar Niemeyer. Showing the Brazilian architect’s interest in volumetric monumentality and formal purity, this building refers to a previous project—the Caracas Museum of Modern Art—which was planned in 1954 but never built. The bold structure, a three-level cupola with a diameter of 164 feet (50 m), is constructed 53 feet (16 m) above the ground. The museum, completed in 1996, projects over a 817-square-foot (75 sq m) reflecting pool that surrounds the cylindrical base. The particular relation between form and landscape evokes a sense of the surreal; by night the pool’s illumination lights the museum from below and emphasizes the illusion that the building is levitating. The museum is placed on a plaza open to the bay, a preexisting viewing point. The suspended ramps lead visitors to the two points of access on the top levels. Two doors lead to the spectacular viewing gallery, a promenade area offering a panoramic view of Guanabara Bay. This gallery, like the other small rooms located on the mezzanine, is used for exhibitions. The lower level under the plaza holds an auditorium, service areas, and a restaurant; it also provides an outstanding view of the landscape. (Juan Pablo Vacas)

The SESC (Social Service for Commerce) is an independent organization supported by contributions from companies with headquarters throughout Brazil. Lina Bo Bardi was asked to design a new social center for the SESC, which had acquired a large group of warehouses in São Paulo previously used as factories. These warehouses were to be demolished in order to construct the community center, but Bo Bardi decided to use the old concrete structures; she transformed them into social areas, housing, a multipurpose restaurant, workshops, a large space for meetings and exhibitions, and a theater.

A smaller piece of land remained, intended for the sports center, but it was crossed by an underground rainwater drainage tunnel, over which it was impossible to build. The solution was to build two separate blocks, with pedestrian bridges in prestressed concrete connecting the two blocks at four levels. To one side is a large cylinder containing the water tower, an allusion to the factory chimney. Between the blocks there is a long wooden deck.

A walk through the SESC Pompéia, which was completed in 1986, is a “socially artistic” experience, to use a Bo Bardi phrase. Enthusiastically used, the Pompéia Factory is a singular habitat that transforms a sports and cultural center into a dynamic social space. (Florencia Alvarez)

The design of the Casa d’Água in São Paulo has a subtle relevance in illustrating what has become known as Tropical Modernism. Reductive in essence, it has a sensuality and warmth missing in European houses of the same genre and serves as an antidote to cold, monastic Minimalism. Casa d’Água combines a contemporary aesthetic with vernacular building materials, and it demonstrates a sound understanding of local climatic considerations. An unassuming, small domestic project completed in 2003, it gives visual expression to many of the characteristics found in the work of Isay Weinfeld: the texture of the stone walls, the delicacy of the woodwork, clean and well-defined volumes, and the judicious use of openings designed to catch natural light.

Although he does not welcome the comparison, Weinfeld is often compared to Oscar Niemeyer, who created a unique brand of modern architecture in Brasília. Like Niemeyer, Weinfeld’s striking mix of Modernist details linked with native Brazilian accents gives rise to an international style leavened by a relaxed geometry and Brazilian colors and textures.

Weinfeld’s bold and elegant architecture reads as narrative imbued with the personal associations of his patrons. The plot at the Casa d’Água is long and narrow, which led him to create a central patio dividing the building into two blocks. A narrow pool with large granite stones anchored to the bottom runs alongside the house and leads to this patio. (Jennifer Hudson)

In the work of Lina Bo Bardi , the relation between architectural and political ideas is so close as to make it impossible to consider one without the other. Educated in Italy, she moved to Brazil after World War II. When in 1959 she moved to the city of Salvador, her work on the relation between social and aesthetic issues reached a new level.

The Church of Espírito Santo do Cerrado in Uberlândia, completed in 1982, beautifully captures this attitude. Situated in a disadvantaged area of the city, the church was built using recycled materials from other buildings. Architects, local citizens, and clerics all donated their time to help complete the project. The church consists of four cylinders of different size and height. Starting from the north corner and moving to the opposite end of the site, the first cylinder is the campanile. Then the largest of the circular spaces contains the actual church, whereas the two volumes that terminate the composition respectively house the area for three nuns to live in and a small, semi-open area that is used as a gathering point for the local community. The lack of rectilinear walls and corners lends the space a sense of continuity and movement that dispenses with the traditional hierarchy of religious spaces. This is further reinforced by the use in all areas of simple materials, such as masonry and wood.

Bo Bardi sketches an idea of religion detached from the solemn, transcendental concept developed in the Western tradition and reaffirms the need for a refreshing, democratic, new beginning in Brazil. (Richard Bell)