Monument to the Dead of World War II

Up on this wide granite platform, the memorial feels less like a conventional military fortress and more like an open frame for the sea.

When Brazil set out in the 1950s to build a national monument for its wartime dead, the conventional choice across the world was still classical arches, marble columns, or neoclassical victory statues. But two young Brazilian architects, Marcos Konder Netto and Hélio Ribas Marinho, had something entirely different in mind. In 1956, they won the national design competition by proposing an unapologetically modern, exposed-concrete monument that refused old imperial clichés.

To make the radical geometry actually stand up, they brought in Joaquim Cardozo, a brilliant structural engineer who happened to also be a celebrated poet. Cardozo worked out the daring mathematics. He anchored two raw concrete pylons rising thirty-one meters into the sky, then balanced an enormous concrete slab of two hundred and twenty square meters high above the platform.