This is the new seat of the government of the state of Minas Gerais, of which Belo Horizonte is the capital. The ensemble includes five buildings, the main of which is the Tiradentes Palace, which houses the government. Its main volume, a glazed parallelepiped with a length of 147 m and a height of 4 floors, is suspended from a concrete frame with 1080 steel cables, making the palace the largest of its kind in the world.
Nearby there are two 15-storey buildings "Minas" and "Gerais", the curvilinear plans of which are parallel to each other. Staff from 16 state government secretariats work there. The ensemble also includes an auditorium with 500 seats and a rounded "center of coexistence" with a dining room for 4000 seats, shops and bank branches. The last building will serve the officials working in the "Administrative City" - a total of more than 16,000 people. They also have a parking lot for 5,000 cars. The complex has a garden with artificial reservoirs, fountains and bridges. The total usable area of the buildings is 804,000 m2, and the budget is 666.7 million dollars.
The ensemble is located on the outskirts of Belo Horizonte, on the way to the airport, also named after Tancredo Nevis, the first democratically elected President of Brazil since the military dictatorship. Intrigues are added by the fact that the customer of the ambitious project was the governor of Minas Gerais, Aesio Nevis, the grandson of Tancredo, who is a likely contender for the presidency of the country.
It should be added that Niemeyer built a lot in Belo Horizonte, and now there are more of his structures than in any other Brazilian city (14 in total). The first major independent project of his career, the complex in Pampulha, was built there in the 1940s - commissioned by Juscelino Kubitschek, then governor of the state of Minas Gerais, who later became president and invited Niemeyer to design the main public buildings in Brasilia he founded.
