Palace of Agriculture
Niemeyer's formal creativity has been compared to that of sculptors.[24"> In the 1950s, a time of intensive construction in Brazil produced numerous commissions. Yves Bruand[25"> stressed that Niemeyer's 1948 project for a theatre next to the Ministry of Education and Health allowed him to develop his vocabulary. In 1950 he was asked to design São Paulo's Ibirapuera Park for the city's 400th anniversary celebration. The plan, which consisted of several porticoed pavilions related via a gigantic free form marquee, had to be simplified due to cost. The resulting buildings were less interesting individually, which meant that the ensemble effect became the dominant aesthetic experience. Niemeyer developed V-shaped pilotis for the project, which became fashionable for a time. A variation on that theme was the W-shaped piloti which supports the Governador Juscelino Kubitschek housing complex (1951), two large buildings containing around 1,000 apartments. Its design was based on Niemeyer's scheme for the Quitandinha apartment hotel in Petrópolis designed one year earlier, but never realised.
