When the German-Brazilian architect Theodor Wiederspahn designed the Majestic, he was attempting something Brazil had never seen. The hotel was the first large building in Porto Alegre to use reinforced concrete, and Wiederspahn pushed the new material to a bold conclusion: two blocks straddling the Araújo Ribeiro Passage, linked by walkways suspended over a public road. Nothing like those floating bridges had been built in the country before. Construction began in 1916, the first wing opened in 1918, and the full hotel was completed in 1933 for the businessman Horácio de Carvalho, rising seven stories in the east wing and five in the west, its silhouette an unmistakable announcement that Porto Alegre had arrived.

For two decades the Majestic was the address where the powerful and the famous stayed when they came to the gaúcho capital. Future presidents Getúlio Vargas and João Goulart passed through its doors. So did singers like Vicente Celestino and Francisco Alves, voices that defined an era of Brazilian popular music. The hotel sat at the social center of a city in its golden age. Then the center of gravity shifted. The neighborhood that had once made the Majestic glamorous became, in time, a problem of security and decline, and the luxury hotel slid quietly toward the rooming house it would become.

Rescue came through a careful bit of public maneuvering. In July 1980 the state bank Banrisul bought the failing hotel so that the government of Rio Grande do Sul could acquire it more cheaply, sealing the purchase on December 29, 1982. From 1983 the city pressed forward with a campaign to revive its historic center, and the Majestic was registered as a building of historical value. Architects Flávio Kiefer and Joel Gorski reimagined the interior, and on September 25, 1990, the Casa de Cultura Mario Quintana opened its doors. The hotel that had nearly been lost became one of the most active cultural houses in southern Brazil.

Today the building holds more than most visitors can absorb in a day: the Lucília Minssen and Érico Veríssimo libraries, theaters, three cinemas, galleries, and part of the Museu de Arte Contemporânea do Rio Grande do Sul, whose collection of 2,229 works leans toward the contemporary artists of the state. The most quietly affecting space is on the fifth-floor terrace. Installed in 2002 in memory of the environmentalist José Lutzenberger, who died that year, the rooftop garden gathers plants from marshes, deserts, prairies, and tropics, many of them growing in vases and bathtubs salvaged from the old Majestic itself, the bones of a vanished hotel coaxed back into bloom.

The man whose name the building carries was, fittingly, someone who made his home in hotels. Mário Quintana was born in Alegrete in 1906 and came to Porto Alegre as a teenager in 1919 to study at the Military School. He earned his living as a journalist and translator, rendering Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and dozens of other books into Portuguese, and his own verse made him beloved across Brazil as the poet of simple things, plain in surface and deep underneath. Solitary by nature, he never married and lived most of his life in rented rooms, the Majestic among them, until his death in 1994 at the age of eighty-seven. There is a quiet rightness in a building rescued for culture bearing the name of the unassuming poet who lingered in its decline, writing about small things in a faded room while the grand hotel emptied out around him.