History

In 1940, Mayor Juscelino Kubitschek commissioned a grand urban development on the northern outskirts of Belo Horizonte: the creation of an artificial lake and a leisure district on its shores. He chose the young Oscar Niemeyer, then 33, to design the buildings. Niemeyer had recently worked under Le Corbusier on the Ministry of Education and Health building in Rio de Janeiro (1936–43), and he was eager to push modernist principles toward a specifically Brazilian sensibility: sinuous, sensual, rooted in the baroque curves of colonial Brazilian churches rather than the rectilinear purism of European modernism.

The four buildings went up in rapid succession between 1940 and 1944. The Casino was the first and immediately recognised as extraordinary — its curved glass wall, flat roof, and open-plan interior on a lake promontory were unlike anything previously built in Brazil. The Iate Tênis Clube (Yacht Club) followed in 1942, with two interlocked barrel-vault concrete shells. The Casa do Baile (Dance Hall, 1942) features a circular dance floor beneath a concrete saucer roof with a projecting bandstand pier over the water. The Chapel of São Francisco de Assis (1943) is widely considered Niemeyer’s masterpiece of this period: four parabolic concrete shells cascade down to the lakeshore, with a tall bell tower; the entire rear wall is covered in azulejo tile panels by Cândido Portinari depicting the life of Saint Francis.

The Chapel’s consecration was delayed eight years because the Archbishop of Belo Horizonte refused to bless so revolutionary a building; it was finally consecrated in 1959. The Casino was closed when Brazil federally banned gambling in 1946 and has operated since 1957 as the Museu de Arte da Pampulha. The ensemble was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2016 — recognised as a direct precursor to Brasília, which Kubitschek and Niemeyer created together on a national scale in 1956–60.