Chronicle No. 69 · Places

Copacabana Palace: The Hotel Brazil Built for a Centenary

Rio's white palace on the beach was ordered up for a world's fair in 1923, then became the address the century came to.

Brazil was preparing for the Independence Centenary International Exposition, and President Epitácio Pessoa faced the problem every host city knows: nowhere to put the visitors.

The answer was a hotel. Octavio Guinle and Francisco Castro Silva built it between 1919 and 1923, on a stretch of sand that was then the unfashionable edge of Rio. The French architect Joseph Gire modelled it on the great Riviera houses he knew — the Negresco in Nice, the Carlton in Cannes — and produced a long white palace facing the Atlantic.

The Copacabana Palace opened on 13 August 1923.

Rio then grew around it, which is the reverse of the usual order. The guest list became a century of fame in one building:

• Josephine Baker, Marlene Dietrich, Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner
• Walt Disney, Orson Welles, Ginger Rogers

Hollywood returned the compliment. Flying Down to Rio (1933) — the film that first paired Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers — used meticulously built sets imitating the hotel's façade. Millions of people fell for a Copacabana Palace that had been reconstructed in California.

The hotel is operated today by Belmond, which LVMH acquired in 2018.

It was commissioned as temporary accommodation for an exhibition. It is still standing after a century because the people who ordered it insisted on beautiful rather than adequate — and beauty, unlike adequacy, keeps earning.

Lesson: Build for the event if you must, but design for the century afterwards — that is what turns infrastructure into an institution.