Architecture of the Christ the Redeemer Statue

The design was settled in the mid-1920s, when Art Deco was the new international style, and it shows. Look at how little there is: no cross, no halo, no drapery flying in the wind. The robe falls in long parallel folds like the fluting on a column, the face is built from a few calm planes, and the figure is perfectly symmetrical.

That restraint is practical as well as fashionable. Fine detail disappears at a distance, and this statue was always meant to be seen from kilometres away. It is recognised as the largest Art Deco sculpture in the world.

Underneath, the statue is a reinforced concrete structure, designed by the engineer Heitor da Silva Costa with the engineer Albert Caquot on his team. The arms are its boldest part, 28 metres from fingertip to fingertip with nothing underneath them.

Concrete is also why the monument was affordable. It cost 2,500 contos de réis, against the 60,000 the Statue of Liberty had cost with its metal frame, and the Sanctuary puts the difference down to reinforced concrete. There was a second reason for avoiding steel: a metal frame could be taken apart and melted down for a war effort, and concrete could not.

Silva Costa chose soapstone for the surface, for its looks and because it resists erosion. It was cut into thousands of small triangles and applied by hand as a mosaic over the whole figure.

The pale stone takes the colour of the light, near white at noon and gold late in the day. It is also repairable. The archdiocese keeps a stock of stone for replacing tiles damaged by weather or lightning, and a full restoration of the surface was carried out in 2010.

The statue is hollow. Inside are twelve levels connected by stairs, which climb to hatches that open in the arms and at the head. Only the maintenance team goes in. At the level of the chest is a stylised Sacred Heart, 1.30 metres high and faced in soapstone, the only decorated surface in the interior.

Sealed inside it is a glass flask holding a parchment with the family trees of Heitor Levy, the master builder, and Pedro Fernandes Viana, the supervising engineer, left there as the statue went up.

The pedestal was the site office while the monument was going up. Since 2006 it has held the chapel of Our Lady of Aparecida, which is the one interior space a visitor can enter.

A figure with its arms out on an exposed peak is a sail and a lightning conductor. The structure was designed for winds of up to 250 kilometres an hour, four times the average recorded on the summit when it was built, and enough for a category 5 hurricane.

Lightning is a routine event. Brazil’s space research institute counts three to five strikes on the statue in a typical year, nearly all harmless because the statue carries lightning rods.

The exception came in January 2014, when a storm broke a piece off the right thumb and damaged the head. The repair was done with matching stone, and a plan was approved to extend the rods over the head and hands.

Work lasted from 1926 to 1931. Materials and workers went up on the Corcovado railway, which had been carrying sightseers since 1884. The master builder, Heitor Levy, lived on the summit for the whole five years.

The visitor facilities are much later. The panoramic lifts and the escalators date from 2002, and until then everybody finished the journey on more than 200 steps. The escalators are being replaced, with the work scheduled to end in May 2027.