Lévi-Strauss called the building “the bastion of civilization” and then made clear how literally he intended the phrase. Goiânia had not grown; it had been decreed. For two centuries the state of Goiás governed itself from a sleepy colonial town of stucco porticos and pebble-paved streets, far inland and effectively cut off from the coast, and the administration under Pedro Ludovico Teixeira wanted a clean slate. Attilio Corrêa Lima drew it for them. Born in Rome in 1901, trained as an engineer-architect, sent to Paris to study urbanism, he was handed the plan of an entire capital as his first commission and laid out residential, administrative, commercial and industrial zones across open grassland as though working on a drawing board. Among the first structures anyone troubled to build was somewhere for outsiders to sleep.

Construction ran from 1935 to July 1936, and the hotel opened the following January - the third building finished in the new city. Three floors, sixty rooms, four luxury apartments, garages, 2,178 square metres of floor. Listed proudly among the amenities: bathrooms served by both hot and cold running water. On a plateau where the roads were still cart tracks, that detail was the entire argument. The purpose was frankly transactional, and nobody pretended otherwise. Ofélia Monteiro described the hotel's objective as “to facilitate the entrance of elements from outside to the State and to facilitate with good facilities the stay of as many have business dealing with the government.” Goiânia needed engineers, financiers and federal officials to come. More than that, it needed them to stay long enough to be persuaded.

The restaurant-bar accomplished what the master plan could not: it made the place sociable. Goianiense society met there, and the hotel hosted the city's first carnival balls, the Police Military Band trading sets with the Jazz Band Imperial. On Saturdays the leaseholder, Maria de Nazaré, played piano for whoever turned up. The guest register filled faster than the street grid. Getúlio Vargas came, the president then remaking Brazil from the top down, and spoke at the Government Palace on 7 August 1940. Pablo Neruda stayed. So did Monteiro Lobato. So, grumbling, did Lévi-Strauss. Standing at the corner of Avenida Goiás and Rua 3, within easy reach of the Praça Cívica and of every road out of town, the Grande Hotel was for a decade the only address in Goiânia that anyone beyond Goiás could name.

Recognition arrived in layers. The municipality listed the building as heritage in 1991, the state followed in 1998, and on 18 November 2003 IPHAN, the national heritage institute, folded it into the protected Art Deco architectural and urban ensemble of Goiânia - one of the largest concentrations of the style anywhere in the Americas. Protection has not settled its future. Decades of remodelling stripped the interior, and what survives from 1936 is essentially the facade. The property belongs to the INSS, Brazil's federal social security institute, though the city government occupied it from around 2004 onward for municipal offices. In 2025 a federal court in Goiás ended that arrangement; the repossession was carried out on 30 May, and the building went back to the INSS with its future unresolved. Lévi-Strauss thought it had no history and nothing to soften its emptiness. Ninety years on it has a great deal of the first and, for the moment, rather too much of the second.