Niemeyer laid out the capital's political heart as a triangle of buildings, each facing the others across an open plaza. The National Congress to one side, the Palacio do Planalto presidential office to another, the Supreme Federal Court palace to the third. Three powers of the Brazilian state, rendered in glass and concrete at the end of a long, empty Monumental Axis. Niemeyer himself worked for roughly seventy years on Brasilia's buildings. IPHAN, the national heritage institute, declared the court palace a protected site in 2007, the year Niemeyer turned 100. It is worth remembering that all of this modernist confidence - the clean lines, the thin pillars, the open democratic plaza - was built by the same Brazil that, four years later in 1964, would fall to a military coup that kept the country under dictatorship for more than twenty years.

Cardozo, the engineer, is less famous than Niemeyer but the partnership was essential. The visual effect that makes Niemeyer's buildings feel light - the floating white volumes, the improbably thin columns - required calculation. Cardozo was also a poet of some standing in the Brazilian literary world, and he approached structural engineering the way he approached a sonnet: working toward the minimum that would hold. For the Supreme Federal Court, that meant side pillars fine enough that the massive roof slab reads as hovering. The practical payoff: the building has survived six decades of equatorial rain and intense afternoon sun with relatively little structural distress. The aesthetic payoff: when visitors walk up the ramps, they sense the structure's trust in itself.

The statue in front of the palace does what statues of justice usually do - holds a sword, wears a blindfold, waits - but Ceschiatti's figure is quieter than its European prototypes. Seated, granite, robed. The 1961 sculpture presides over whatever is happening in the plaza: school groups taking photographs, tourists orienting themselves, television crews setting up for broadcasts about whatever decision the justices have handed down that morning. On the afternoon of January 8, 2023, what was happening in the plaza was a riot.

Around 4,000 supporters of defeated President Jair Bolsonaro marched out of the Brazilian Army headquarters and across the Monumental Axis that afternoon, trying to provoke a military coup against the newly inaugurated Lula da Silva government. They broke police lines before 3 p.m. They climbed the ramp of the National Congress and occupied its roof. They stormed and vandalized the Congress, the Planalto Palace, and the Supreme Court building itself. Neither Lula nor Bolsonaro was in Brasilia that day. By 9 p.m. more than 400 people had been arrested, and by March of 2023 the total had grown to 2,182. The Supreme Federal Court ruled that the attack constituted an act of terrorism. International observers drew comparisons to the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol two years earlier and, more distantly, to the 1938 Integralist Uprising. Within days, hundreds of thousands of Brazilians held counter-demonstrations in defense of democracy in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre, Recife, Curitiba, Belo Horizonte, and across the country. The building, like the institution it houses, absorbed the attack and went on functioning.