Obra do Berço — Lagoa, Rio de Janeiro

About the building

The Obra do Berço sits at the corner of Rua Cícero Góis Monteiro and Avenida Epitácio Pessoa, beside the Igreja de Santa Margarida Maria on the east side of the Lagoa. It is a small charitable institution building — a maternity and childcare charity that still operates — and it happens to be the first project Oscar Niemeyer ever built on his own.

The building is organized as two reinforced-concrete blocks, one of four floors and one of two, lifted on pilotis and topped with a roof garden. The northwest facade carries vertical movable brise-soleils — one of the first uses of the device in Brazil. For anyone buying in Lagoa, it is the kind of neighbor that anchors a block: low, quiet, and protected by the state heritage institute INEPAC.

Address: Rua Cícero Góis Monteiro 19, Lagoa, Rio de Janeiro

History

Niemeyer designed the building in 1937, fresh out of Lucio Costa's office and the Ministry of Education project, for the Obra do Berço charity. The design works through the modernist checklist he had absorbed from Le Corbusier — free plan, free facade, pilotis, roof garden — at a domestic scale. He later said he charged nothing for the job and reworked the sun-shading at his own expense when the first version underperformed.

The building was landmarked by INEPAC, Rio state's heritage institute, and remains in use by the same institution. Together with the church next door it forms one of the few protected low-rise corners on this stretch of Epitácio Pessoa.