Praça da Apoteose

The massive concrete curve towering over this plaza was never meant to be subtle. Oscar Niemeyer designed the Grand Arch to be the visual punctuation mark of the Sambadrome, what he called the closing gesture of the entire parade runway. Together with structural engineer José Carlos Sussekind, he pulled off something bordering on reckless: they designed and poured this entire colossal structure in roughly one hundred and twenty days, racing against the clock between late 1983 and February 1984 so the city could hold Carnival.

Suspended right in the middle of the parabolic arch is a heavy concrete plate, floating in midair to act as an acoustic sound reflector. But as soon as the scaffolding came down, Rio did what Rio always does with monumental architecture: it started cracking jokes.

People argued over what Niemeyer had actually built. Critics swore it looked like an upside-down bikini bottom. Others saw the golden arches of McDonald's. Political observers had a sharper theory: the arch formed an enormous letter M, which happened to match TV Manchete, the network that stepped in to broadcast the inaugural parade after the dominant media giant, TV Globo, boycotted the whole venue.

Niemeyer brushed all of that aside. For him, it was simply pure sculpture, a frame meant to hold a piece of the Rio sky. In 2021, the arch and the runway finally received federal heritage protection. Whether you see a radical modernist crown or a cheeky civic riddle, it is hard to imagine Rio's skyline without it.