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Architecture

Architecture in São Paulo

São Paulo is a city of concrete built fast and at scale, and its architecture keeps trying to cut public space back out of that density. Two of the five below are by the same architect, which is hard to avoid here.

• Rosewood São Paulo

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  Completed 2022

  Jean Nouvel

  A hotel in the grounds of the Matarazzo maternity hospital, closed since the early nineties. Jean Nouvel restored the old buildings and added a tower whose concrete frame is planted at every level, so the addition reads as a vertical garden beside the brick. The tower widens as it rises, giving the most planting to the floors that carry it best. Old and new are left plainly distinguishable rather than blended.

• SESC Pompéia

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  Completed 1986

  Lina Bo Bardi

  A leisure and culture centre made from a drum factory in the Pompéia district. Lina Bo Bardi kept the sheds and their trusses exactly as she found them and put the programme underneath, then added two raw concrete towers linked by walkways at the back. Openings in the towers were cut as irregular holes rather than as windows. She treated an industrial ruin as a finished building that only needed a use.

• FAU-USP

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  Completed 1969

  João Vilanova Artigas

  The architecture faculty at the University of São Paulo. João Vilanova Artigas raised a concrete slab on tapered piers and left every side open, so the building has no doors and the ground runs straight through it. Inside, the floors step around a covered central hall lit through a translucent roof. It was built as an argument that a school of architecture should have no barriers between its parts.

• MASP

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  Completed 1968

  Lina Bo Bardi

  The art museum on Avenida Paulista, suspended from two red concrete beams. Lina Bo Bardi hung the galleries clear of the ground so the block below stays open as a public terrace, which she treated as the point of the design. Paintings were shown inside on glass easels standing free in the room rather than hung on walls. The building gives its site away and keeps only the air above it.

• Copan

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  Completed 1966

  Oscar Niemeyer

  A residential block in the centre, built as one curved slab. Oscar Niemeyer ran the plan as an S so the facade meets the street at a constant angle while the block turns, and screened the whole elevation in horizontal brise-soleil. More than a thousand apartments of different sizes sit behind that single surface. It holds the population of a small town inside a shape drawn in one line.