Designed by Oscar Niemeyer, completed 1960 Brazil The free and vigorous forms of Oscar Niemeyer’s works, such as Pampulha (1943) and Canoas House (1954), were already internationally recognized when he visited Europe in 1954. Niemeyer was impressed by classical buildings he saw there—their monumentality and their sense of permanence. This led him to introduce new concepts in his architecture. Niemeyer started to emphasize pure and concise forms as well as single volumes die-tated by structure in order to achieve monumentality. The opportunity for Niemeyer to concretize this new vision came when he was commissioned to design the buildings of Brasilia, the new planned capital of Brazil, built between 1957 and 1960. Adopting the main principles of modern urbanism, Lucio Costa’s plan for Brasilia achieved an appropriate expression of a capital with two axes crossing each other in right angles. The composition, resembling a plane, is very simple, unified, clear, and elegant. In the curved w...