Cathedral of Brasília

Oscar Niemeyer's cathedral for Brasília is hardly a building in the ordinary sense — more a crown of sixteen curved concrete ribs rising from a round base and gathering at the waist before flaring open again against the sky. The form is a hyperboloid, and the architect meant it as a gesture: hands raised together towards heaven. Seen from the Esplanada dos Ministérios, the monumental axis of the capital, it is one of the few buildings in the planned city that looks the same from every side, and one of the few religious buildings of the twentieth century that has become a national image.

The idea came together with the city itself. The cornerstone was laid in September 1958, and the bare structure — the sixteen columns, each weighing about 90 tonnes, calculated by the engineer Joaquim Cardozo — stood complete on 21 April 1960. Then the building waited for years as a bare skeleton; it was consecrated in 1968 and formally opened in 1970 as the Metropolitan Cathedral of Our Lady of Aparecida. The roof spans some 70 metres across and rises about 42 metres, and much of the building sits below ground: visitors enter through an underground passage and come up into the nave, so that the sudden flood of light and height is part of the design.

Inside, the space is filled with coloured light. The glass between the ribs was given its present stained glass in 1990 by the French-Brazilian artist Marianne Peretti, the only woman in Niemeyer's circle of collaborators on the new capital: some 2,000 square metres of broad swirls of blue, green, white and brown that tint the whole interior. Three angels by Alfredo Ceschiatti are suspended beneath the ribs, seeming to float above the congregation of up to 4,000, and outside, four bronze Evangelists by Ceschiatti and Dante Croce stand guard at the entrance. Beside the cathedral stand a separate bell tower about 20 metres high and a baptistery with tiles by Athos Bulcão, while a shallow reflecting pool rings the roof and doubles the ribs in water. The cathedral was declared a national historic monument in 1990.

Getting there

The cathedral stands on the Esplanada dos Ministérios in the Plano Piloto, the original planned core of Brasília. Presidente Juscelino Kubitschek International Airport (BSB) is about 9 km away. The other buildings of the Esplanada, most of them also by Niemeyer, line the axis beyond it.