It went to Oscar Niemeyer. The same architect who had designed Brasilia's Supreme Federal Court Palace and its presidential Planalto sketched a cenotaph for the plaza that united them - the Praca dos Tres Poderes. His design symbolized a dove. Three floors, 2,105 square meters, white concrete rising in curved planes. French President Francois Mitterrand laid the foundation stone on October 15, 1985, six months after Neves died. The Pantheon of the Fatherland and Freedom was inaugurated on September 7, 1986, Brazil's independence day. An eternal flame burns atop a diagonal tower outside, representing, as the official language has it, the freedom of the people and the independence of the country.

There are no bodies inside. The Pantheon is a cenotaph - a memorial without tombs - and the honored are remembered through something called the Livro de Aco, the Book of Steel, also called the Livro dos Herois da Patria. It sits on the third floor, and each time a new name is entered its metal pages a ceremony is held. The first name entered, on April 21, 1992 - the bicentennial of his execution - was Joaquim Jose da Silva Xavier, known as Tiradentes, the tooth-puller who led the 1789 Inconfidencia Mineira against Portuguese rule and was hanged, drawn, and quartered as a warning. Zumbi dos Palmares, the last leader of the great runaway-slave community that existed for nearly a century in the Brazilian northeast, joined him in 1997.

The list in the Book of Steel is deliberately broad. It includes emperors (Dom Pedro I) and republican founders (Deodoro da Fonseca). It includes women who led men into battle (Maria Felipa de Oliveira commanded 200 fighters at Itaparica; Jovita Feitosa was a pioneer woman soldier in the Paraguayan War) and women who fought in other ways (Esperanca Garcia, an enslaved Afro-Brazilian woman who became Brazil's first female lawyer; Zuleika Angel Jones, who documented the disappearances of political prisoners under the dictatorship that Neves was elected to end). It includes indigenous heroes (Sepe Tiaraju, the Guarani tribal leader), and abolitionist journalists (Luis Gama), and religious thinkers (Saint Joseph of Anchieta, co-founder of Sao Paulo; Chico Xavier, the spiritist medium whose books sold in the millions). Dandara and Luisa Mahin are there as leaders of colonial-era slave revolts. Santos-Dumont is there for flying the 14-bis on the centenary of that 1906 flight. The book keeps growing.

The interior holds two works honoring the martyrs of the Inconfidencia Mineira. On the second floor, in the Red Hall, Athos Bulcao's Liberty Wall forms a triangle out of three modular panels, each 13.54 meters long and 2.76 meters high - the triangular symbol of the failed 1789 revolt. On the third floor, near the stained glass by Marianne Peretti - the same artist who designed the glass for Brasilia's cathedral - a seven-panel work by John Hall and Son tells the Inconfidencia story in phases, culminating in the torture of Tiradentes. The building was listed for national heritage protection in 2007, the year Niemeyer turned 100 and IPHAN registered 34 of his works on the same day. Inside the Pantheon, the permanent exhibition dedicated to Tancredo Neves reopened in 2013, with documents, films by Silvio Tendler, and interactive displays about the man whose death prompted all of this.