Turing Stone Casino

Turing Stone Casino

Turing Stone Casino

In 1941 Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira, then the Mayor of Belo Horizonte Brazil, asked his young friend Oscar Niemeyer to design three buildings for a new suburb that Kubitschek wanted to build in Pampulha, a neighborhood named for the attractive lake at its center.

Niemeyer and the Work of Lucio Costa and Le Corbusier

Niemeyer, then 33 years old, had graduated in architecture from the National School of Fine Arts, Rio de Janeiro, in 1934 and had immediately gone to work for architect Lucio Costa, a well established architect considered one of Brazil’s leading exponents of modernist architecture.

While a member of the Costa team, Niemeyer had worked on the design for the Brazilian Ministry of Education and Health building in Rio in 1936. Then in 1939 he worked on the design for the Brazilian Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. While working on the Ministry building he was exposed to the work of Le Corbusier, (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, a Swiss architect who chose that professional name).