Brazilian Modernist Architecture

Brazilian modernist architecture is most closely associated with Oscar Niemeyer, who rejected straight angles and rigid lines in favor of free flowing, sensual curves realized chiefly in reinforced concrete, his signature building material. Niemeyer's breakthrough came in 1940 with the Pampulha project in Belo Horizonte, an artificial lake complex whose Church of Saint Francis of Assisi fused wall and roof into unified curved concrete shells, and the movement gained international recognition through the Brazil Builds exhibition held at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1943. Its most ambitious expression came at Brasilia, the new Brazilian capital that President Juscelino Kubitschek commissioned in 1956, where Niemeyer designed the National Congress, the Cathedral and the presidential residences within four years under a unified design vocabulary, working alongside urban planner Lucio Costa, a student of Le Corbusier whose city plan itself reflected core modernist principles.