Location and site

The Pampulha Modern Ensemble was the centre of a visionary garden city project created in 1940 at Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais State. Designed around an artificial lake, this cultural and leisure centre included a casino, a ballroom, the Golf Yacht Club and the São Francisco de Assis church. The buildings were designed by architect Oscar Niemeyer, in collaboration with innovative artists. The Ensemble comprises bold forms that exploit the plastic potential of concrete, while fusing architecture, landscape design, sculpture and painting into a harmonious whole. It reflects the influence of local traditions, the Brazilian climate and natural surroundings on the principles of modern architecture.

Urban Morphology

The Casino, Ballroom, Golf Yacht Club and São Francisco De Assis Church, were designed by architect Oscar Niemeyer who, working in collaboration with engineer Joaquim Cardozo, and artists including Cândido Portinari, created bold forms that exploited the plastic potential of concrete, and integrated the plastic arts such as ceramics and sculpture. Landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx reinforced the links between the buildings and their natural landscapes through designed gardens and a circuit of walkable spaces to reflect a dialogue with nature that emphasized the buildings as special pictures mirrored in the lake.

Registration Criteria

Criterion (i): Niemeyer, Burle Marx and Portinari collectively delivered a landscape ensemble that as a whole is outstanding for the way it manifests a new fluid modern architectural language fused with the plastic arts and design, and one that interacts with its landscape context.

Criterion (ii): The Pampulha Modern Ensemble was linked to reciprocal influences between European and North America and the Latin American periphery and particularly to a poetic reaction to the perceived austerity of modern European architecture.

In establishing a synthesis between local regional practices and universal trends, as well as fostering dynamic links between architecture, landscape design and the plastic arts, Pampulha inaugurated a new direction in modern architecture which subsequently was used to assert new national identities in recently independent Latin American countries.

Criterion (iv): The Pampulha ensemble and its innovative architectural and landscape concepts reflects a particular stage in architectural history in South America, which in turn reflects wider socio-economic changes in society beyond the region. The economic crises of 1929 prompted demands for people to have greater inclusion in nation building. These circumstances influenced the design of the new garden city neighbourhood of Belo Horizonte as a place that could reflect creative and cultural ‘autonomy’ through innovative architectural buildings designed for public use, set in a designed ‘natural’ landscape, well endowed with public spaces for leisure and exercise.

Historical Reference

Designed in 1940 around an artificial lake, the Pampulha ensemble, of four buildings set within landscaped grounds, was a centre for leisure and culture in the ‘garden city’ neighbourhood of Belo Horizonte, built as the new capital of Minas Gérais State.