Cassino da Urca — Urca, Rio de Janeiro

About the building

The white eclectic-style building curving along Avenida João Luís Alves 13 faces the small Urca beach across the bay from Botafogo. Built in the early 1920s, it has had four distinct lives — bath hotel, casino, television studio and university — and its silhouette is the postcard image of the Urca waterfront, with the Sugarloaf cable-car station a few minutes away.

Since 2014 it has housed the Rio campus of the Istituto Europeo di Design (IED), which restored the building for studios and labs. For Urca itself, the building bookends the Mureta da Urca seawall promenade, the social heart of one of Rio's quietest and most tightly held residential neighborhoods.

Address: Avenida João Luís Alves 13, Urca, Rio de Janeiro

History

The building went up in the early 1920s, in time for the 1922 centennial exposition, to a design by architects Archimedes Memória and Francisco Couchet, and opened as the Hotel Balneário da Urca with 34 rooms. In 1933 entrepreneur Joaquim Rolla converted it into the Cassino da Urca, which became Brazil's most celebrated casino — its stage launched and hosted stars including Carmen Miranda — until federal law banned gambling in 1946.

Assis Chateaubriand bought the building in 1950 and installed TV Tupi, which broadcast from the old casino until 1980. After decades of disuse and a long restoration partly funded through BNDES heritage money, the Istituto Europeo di Design opened its Rio campus there in 2014.