The passive vibration control of buildings using pendulum absorber has been extensively studied in the technical literature and used in high buildings such as the Taipei-101 in Taiwan. Since the frequency of the pendulum depends only on its length and the acceleration of gravity, to tune the frequency of the pendulum to that of the building, its length is the sole design variable. However, in many cases, the pendulum length and the space required for its installation are not consistent with the design. In these cases one can replace the classic pendulum with an equivalent pendulum system comprising a mass that moves on a curved surface, allowing greater flexibility in the absorber design as the length of pendulum becomes irrelevant and the shape of the curved surface can be optimized. Because of the mass movement on the curved surface, new inertia and stiffness forces not found in the classic pendulum may appear. In the present work a pendulum system comprising a mass that moves through rolling bearings on a curved surface is proposed for control of the oscillations of structures under base excitation. This pendulum system has the advantage of being used both as a pendulum tuned mass damper (APMS) and as a base isolation pendulum system (IBP). As the pendulum system can, in certain cases, display large rotations, barriers which limit its movement are proposed, generating impact forces whose efficiency in vibration control is here investigated.