This chapter examines a few of the landmark narratives on the issue of national character published between 1880 and 1940. Following the views of Lucio Marcal Ferreira Ribeiro Lima Costa patron, Costa held that it was instead the simple architecture of anonymous master builders that embodied the functional, technical, and aesthetic homogeneity of Brazilianness. In the drive to rehabilitate nineteenth-century Brazilian art and architecture, the actual discourses by which it came to be ostracized have themselves been suppressed from scholarship. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the decline of colonial and imperial plantation elites from northeast Brazil and the rise to power of coffee-growing and cattle-ranching oligarchies from the southeast, followed by the rise of industrial capitalism. The unchallenged ethos of national genius that Costa helped construct for Niemeyer remains to the day a favourite topic of debate on the nature of professional practice in Brazilian architecture.