The CCBB Building on Praca da Liberdade
Luiz Signorelli (architect) · 1926 to 1930
Look across the fountains of the square and you see a long pale building with a colonnade of tall columns on its upper floors, a balustrade along the roof and a flight of steps rising to an arched door guarded by a stone lion. It was built between nineteen twenty six and nineteen thirty as the seat of the State Secretariat for Public Security and Assistance, and it was inaugurated on the seventh of September nineteen thirty, only weeks before the revolution that brought Getulio Vargas to power. For most of the twentieth century it housed the police administration and later the state prosecutor's office.
The architect was Luiz Signorelli, an Italian-born engineer who founded the school of architecture in Belo Horizonte and gave the young capital several of its official buildings. His style here is the eclectic classicism of the Brazilian state in the nineteen twenties: a rusticated ground floor, giant columns above, garlands and cartouches over the windows, and inside a marble staircase and stained glass. Notice how the building is set back behind its steps and iron railings, so that it reads as a palace rather than an office, and how the pale stone-coloured render matches the other secretariats around the square.
Banco do Brasil took a lease on the empty building in two thousand and nine and spent four years restoring it, cleaning the facades, reinforcing the structure, roofing the courtyard and inserting a theatre and galleries without touching the historic rooms. The CCBB opened on the twenty seventh of August two thousand and thirteen. The lion above the door and the bronze lamps of the entrance hall are original, and the whole building is listed as part of the protected architectural ensemble of the square.
Did You Know? The building was inaugurated on the seventh of September nineteen thirty, and within weeks the revolution of nineteen thirty had turned it into the headquarters of the rebel forces in Minas Gerais.
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