Palacio do Planalto

Palacio do Planalto is the official workplace of the President of Brazil, completed in 1960 as part of the purpose-built capital city of Brasilia and designed by the architect Oscar Niemeyer within the overall urban plan laid out by Lucio Costa. Its most recognizable feature is the row of slender, asymmetrically curved concrete columns that support the building's upper floors, a sculptural structural form that became one of the defining visual motifs of Niemeyer's work and of Brasilia's modernist architecture more broadly. The palace's open colonnades and reflecting ramp, rather than a conventional staircase, were intended to give the seat of executive power a light, transparent character distinct from the heavier government buildings of earlier eras. Brasilia's central government complex, including the Palacio do Planalto, was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987, recognized as a singular achievement of twentieth century urban planning and architecture.