In Brazil, the cultural sector is reborn after the dark years of Bolsonaro

Just like Sugarloaf Mountain or Corcovado with its Christ the Redeemer, it is one of the jewels of Rio de Janeiro. But the Capanema Palace enjoys neither the aura nor the popularity of its granite neighbors. This 16-story building, erected in 1945, is nevertheless one of the most flamboyant examples of Brazilian architecture, a sumptuous work, the fruit of the dream team of the time: urban planner Lucio Costa (1902-1998), landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994), painter Candido Portinari (1903-1962) and a young, little-known architect with a bright future ahead of him… Oscar Niemeyer (1907-2012).

Azure curtain walls, movable sunshades, 10-meter stilts, mosaics of shells and seahorses, a hanging garden... The building is a treatise on architectural modernism. And for good reason: the team benefited from the advice of Le Corbusier (1887-1965), who came in 1962 to inspect the site ( "It's beautiful, it's beautiful..." , the master simply said, amazed). Vinicius de Moraes (1913-1980), bossa nova legend, was more lyrical, celebrating, in his poem Azul e branco ("blue and white"), this aerial and aquatic building, as if born "in the green thickness of the seabed" .

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