National Congress Palace, Parliament building in Brasília, Brazil

The National Congress Palace is a white, flat-roofed complex on a paved plaza: a long horizontal base with a colonnade and glass behind it, fronted by a shallow reflecting pool. Behind the base stand two narrow, flat-topped towers, 28 storeys high, their facades gridded with small windows. To the left of the towers a white hemisphere dome rises from the roof; to the right sits a shallow bowl-shaped form.

The National Congress moved from Rio de Janeiro, where the Senate sat in the Monroe Palace and the Chamber of Deputies in Tiradentes Palace, to a single palace in Brasília. Oscar Niemeyer produced the first preliminary designs in 1957, with structural calculations by Joaquim Cardozo, and the building opened in 1960. IPHAN listed it as national heritage in 2007.

The building is officially named after Nereu Ramos, a former president of the Chamber of Deputies. The Senate sits under the shallow bowl-shaped dome, the Chamber of Deputies under the hemisphere, and the two 28-storey annex towers between them hold administrative offices. The large lawn in front of the building is used for rallies and public demonstrations.

The building sits at the vertex of the Praça dos Três Poderes, with the Palácio do Planalto and the Supreme Federal Court at the other two corners; the large lawn in front, along the Monumental Axis, is where marches and protests gather. The inclined garden on the west façade occupies the site once planned for an auditorium. The two annex towers hold administrative offices across twenty-eight floors.

The Chamber of Deputies' bowl-shaped dome had to appear as if merely resting on the slab, so engineer Joaquim Cardozo worked out the tangency equations that let Niemeyer's curve meet the roof. He reportedly said he had found the tangent that would make the dome seem only set down on the slab.