Start with the name, because it is misleading. Usina do Gasômetro means roughly the gasholder plant, yet this station never ran on gas. It burned coal. The word gasômetro came from the neighborhood, an area called the Volta do Gasômetro that had taken its name from an older nearby factory, the Usina de Gás. So the building carries a borrowed name for a fuel it never used - a small accident of geography that stuck for a century. What it actually did was generate electricity, and for decades it powered the streetcars and streetlights of a growing capital.

The thermal power station was inaugurated on November 11, 1928, as the headquarters of the Companhia Brasil de Força Elétrica - a subsidiary of the American firm Electric Bond and Share Company, which controlled Porto Alegre's electricity and electric transport until 1954. The plant's most famous feature came later: in 1937 the company raised a monumental chimney, eventually standing some 117 meters tall, to carry the soot away from the city. That stack outlived the smoke. The generators ran until 1974, when the plant was finally deactivated, its furnaces cold and its purpose apparently spent.

What happened next nearly didn't. The municipal government wanted the plant gone, the land cleared to extend Perimetral avenue straight through the riverfront. A power station turned to rubble for a road - it would have been an ordinary fate for an old industrial hulk. But civil organizations fought to preserve it, and they won. In 1982 Eletrobras handed the land to the city; the building was listed for protection by the municipality that same year and by the state in 1983. Restored in 1988, the old plant reopened in 1991 with an entirely new life - not as a generator, but as a cultural center.

Today the Usina do Gasômetro is six floors of galleries, theaters, and performance spaces wrapped inside its restored brick shell. But its true stage is outside. The plant sits on the tip of a peninsula jutting into Lake Guaíba, which faces west - and so each evening the building becomes Porto Alegre's grandstand for the sunset. Thousands gather on the esplanade to watch the sky catch fire over the water, the great chimney a black exclamation point against the color. An industrial relic the city tried to erase has become the place where the city most loves to simply stand and look.