Niemeyer designed the National Congress Palace as part of the first wave of buildings that would populate Brazil's new capital. Construction wrapped in 1960, the same year the capital formally moved from Rio de Janeiro to this plateau in the Goiás hinterland. The Senate's upward-facing dome was meant to suggest deliberation, a vessel catching ideas. The downward-facing dome over the Chamber of Deputies reads, depending on who you ask, as either a shell of protection or an inverted reception. Between them, the twin towers hold offices for senators and deputies, connected at midpoint by a horizontal span that catches light at odd hours. The whole thing is held together by proportions that feel inevitable once you see them - which is Niemeyer's signature trick.

On 4 December 1963, the Senate floor became a crime scene. Senator Arnon de Melo of Alagoas - father of Fernando Collor de Mello, who would himself become president decades later - drew a gun during a confrontation with Senator Silvestre Péricles, also of Alagoas. Arnon's shot missed his target and struck José Kairala, a substitute senator from Acre who happened to be in the line of fire. Kairala died. The killing happened inside a chamber designed to be the heart of Brazilian deliberation, not three years after that chamber opened. The story is still told in Brasília, the kind of episode that makes the building feel less like a monument and more like a place where real and consequential things have gone wrong.

On 8 January 2023, a week after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office for his third term as president, thousands of supporters of outgoing president Jair Bolsonaro marched from the Brazilian Army Headquarters toward the Three Powers Plaza. They numbered roughly four thousand. By mid-afternoon they had pushed through police barriers and climbed onto the ramp and the roof of the Congress Palace. Some made it inside, smashing windows, tearing furniture, and vandalizing chambers that had stood intact through coups and redemocratization. The Supreme Federal Court and the Palácio do Planalto were attacked the same day. Neither Lula nor Bolsonaro was in Brasília. By nightfall more than four hundred people had been arrested, and by March the number had passed two thousand. The Supreme Federal Court classified the attacks as acts of terrorism, and analysts around the world compared them to the United States Capitol assault of two years before.

In 1987 UNESCO named Brasília a World Heritage Site, recognizing the original urban composition as a singular moment in twentieth-century architecture. The Congress Palace anchors that composition. In 2007 Brazil's National Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage gave the building its own listing as national heritage. In front of the domes stretches a long lawn that is, by design, where Brazilians come to demonstrate. Protest marches, indigenous gatherings, union rallies - they all end here, in the shadow of those two domes. The lawn is the point. Niemeyer wanted the building to feel approachable, not fortified. The decision to leave that vast green open is part of why the building still works as a symbol rather than a stage set.

Approach Brasília from the air and the city reads like a diagram. The Monumental Axis runs east to west, and the Congress domes sit at its eastern terminus. The rectangular towers rise roughly thirty stories. The domes are plain white, meant to catch the hard cerrado sun. The reflecting pool in front of the building doubles the domes visually, so from the right angle it looks like four shapes instead of two. At cruising altitude the geometry is unmistakable. Nothing else on the plateau looks anything like it.