The Brazilian icon of modernist architecture left the only example of his genius on Portuguese shores at the Pestana Casino Park Hotel.
“Why don’t you ask Niemeyer?” In 1965, the family of António Xavier Barreto had just bought the crumbling Funchal Casino and were looking to turn it into a hotel. Chatting over dinner, Brazilian diplomat Hugo Gouthier suggested they contact the renowned architect. An icon of modernism and a known communist, Niemeyer was in Portugal at the time, visiting his friend Juscelino Kubitschek, an ex-president of Brazil in voluntary exile.
The suggestion was both unexpected and opportune, while the reaction of the Barretos, a Goan family living in Mozambique, was very enthusiastic. Shortly afterwards, two of the sons (José and Eurico) met Niemeyer in an Estoril hotel, armed with topographical plans and detailed aerial photographs. In a remarkable succession of events, the architect accepted the proposal and scheduled another meeting in Paris.
It was there, in 1966, in the presence of Eurico Barreto, after 24 hours of draughting and trashing ideas that the architect exclaimed: “Amazing, bloody nature!”, the story recounted by Barreto to Carlos Oliveira Santos, author of the book O Nosso Niemeyer (Our Niemeyer). Five handwritten pages and a 3D model were enough to outline the key ideas for the Casino Park Hotel, which opened ten years later and remains the only project designed by the Brazilian in Portugal. In 1985, it became part of the Pestana Hotel Group.
An exceptional team
Accounts of Niemeyer’s visit to Madeira vary considerably. The architect himself remembered going when the Casino Park project was still at the design stage. Others say that he went on a stopover to Brazil during construction. Snowed under with work, the Brazilian delegated most of the project to Viana de Lima, a Porto architect who was a renowned exponent of modernism in Portugal and a key player in this architecturally unique and challenging project.
At a time when calculation technology was thin of the ground, it was an engineer from Lisbon’s Instituto Superior Técnico, Madeira Costa, who was tasked to find solutions to achieve Niemeyer’s clean and sensual lines, which seem to spring from nature: from the restaurant with ocean view, a 3,500-squaremetre platform with no pillars, to the transparent façade surrounding the lobby and the huge spiral staircase.
The interiors were the work of Daciano Costa, who bridged the gap between Viana de Lima’s rationality and Niemeyer’s sensuality with a variety of inspirations: Dutch and Soviet constructivism, cinematographic language, hardwoods (sucupira and wenge) and delicate artworks, fabrics and lacquer. In Oliveira Santos’ book, O Nosso Niemeyer, he recalls: “At one point, the main role of [works coordinator] engineer Lampreia was – and I say this with no disrespect, of course – managing the prima-donnas, Viana de Lima, myself, Madeira Costa… It could have been a huge fiasco, but things got done.”
