THE BUILDING
How Christ the Redeemer Was Built
The nine-year story of the statue on Corcovado: the engineer, the French sculptor, the reinforced concrete and the soapstone skin that gives it its pale face.
Check dates and availability ↗An idea that circled for seventy years
A monument on Corcovado was proposed as early as the 1850s, when a priest suggested a Christian statue to honour the imperial family, but nothing came of it and a later plan was refused. The version that was actually built belongs to the 1920s, when a Catholic circle in Rio launched a subscription campaign to raise funds from the faithful, partly as a response to what they saw as rising secularism. The site was chosen for its visibility rather than any long religious tradition: from the summit the figure would be seen across almost the whole city. Approval came in the early 1920s, and the engineer Heitor da Silva Costa was appointed to lead the design and construction of a statue that had, until then, existed only as a civic ambition.
Heitor da Silva Costa and the design
The Brazilian engineer Heitor da Silva Costa is the figure most responsible for the statue as it stands. He travelled to Europe to develop the design and to solve the practical problems of building something so large on an exposed peak. Early concepts reportedly imagined Christ holding a cross and a globe; the open-armed form that was finally chosen reads, from a distance, almost as a cross itself. Silva Costa worked with the artist Carlos Oswald on the composition, and it was in France that the project connected with the sculptor who would model the figure. The collaboration matters because the statue is genuinely a joint Franco-Brazilian work: conceived and engineered in Rio, but shaped by hands in a Paris studio.
Landowski's figure, Leonida's face
The French-Polish sculptor Paul Landowski modelled the statue in his studio near Paris, working at scale and producing the figure in sections rather than as a single mass. The head and the hands were made separately, and the face — the detail most people photograph — is credited to the Romanian sculptor Gheorghe Leonida. The components were cast, crated and shipped across the Atlantic to Rio, then hauled up Corcovado, in many cases on the same rack railway that carries visitors today. Assembling a statue this size on a narrow summit, from parts made a continent away, was as much a feat of logistics as of art, and it explains why the build stretched across most of a decade.
Why reinforced concrete, not stone
A stone statue of these dimensions on that summit was never realistic — the weight and the exposure to wind ruled it out. The structural answer came from reinforced concrete, with the French engineer Albert Caquot, one of the leading concrete specialists of his day, credited for the internal engineering. Concrete let the builders create a hollow, relatively light structure strong enough to stand against the gales that regularly hit the peak. The figure stands around 30 metres tall, roughly 38 metres including its pedestal, with an arm span near 28 metres and a weight often given at about 635 tonnes. Those measurements are widely cited rather than something you should treat as precise to the centimetre, but they convey the scale: this is a building shaped like a person.
The soapstone skin
The grey concrete core is clad in a mosaic of thousands of small triangular tiles of soapstone, a soft, pale stone that is easy to work and weathers well. That cladding is why the surface reads as light-coloured and faintly textured rather than smooth or bare concrete, and why the statue has a slightly mottled quality up close. Soapstone was chosen for durability and workability, and applying the tiles by hand across the whole figure was painstaking work. Accounts often note that the tiles were mounted onto backing and set piece by piece, some carrying inscriptions on their reverse. Restoration campaigns since have re-sourced and replaced tiles, so the skin you see has been renewed over the decades even as the form has stayed constant.
Inaugurated in 1931
After roughly nine years of work, the statue was inaugurated on 12 October 1931. It has stood on Corcovado ever since as the defining image of Rio and, by common description, the largest Art Deco sculpture in the world — the clean, stylised geometry of the figure and its draped robe is squarely of its period. Since then it has been struck by lightning more than once, restored several times, floodlit, and in 2006 given a chapel at its base. What began as a subscription drive by a religious society has become one of the most recognised built objects on the planet, though the essential engineering choices — concrete inside, soapstone outside — remain exactly as the 1920s team resolved them.