The 10 Architectural Sites You Should See in São Paulo

Present-day São Paulo — a sprawl of concrete towers and asphalt laid like a quilt over Brazil’s interior hills — began to take shape at the end of the 19th century, growing alongside the coffee plantations that thrived in the region’s hinterlands. But it was over the course of the following century that its most influential architectural designs were constructed, dotting the city with some of the world’s most extraordinary Modernist buildings.

Brazil’s Modernist movement began in São Paulo during a 1922 exhibition and conference series called the Semana de Arte Moderna. In the course of a week, artists including Tarsila do Amaral, Emiliano Di Cavalcanti and Anita Malfatti and writers such as Mário de Andrade argued for an approach to modernity that would draw inspiration not from Europe, but from Brazilian culture and society. Six years later, Gregori Warchavchik, an émigré from Odessa, in what is now Ukraine, completed Brazil’s first Modernist building: his own home, the aptly named Casa Modernista, in São Paulo’s Vila Mariana neighborhood.

In the decades that followed, the city developed one of Latin America’s most distinctive architectural languages, known as Paulista Modernism or the Paulista School. Rather than mirroring Brazil’s famously voluptuous landscape, as many of their counterparts in Rio de Janeiro did, architects in São Paulo reflected the infrastructure of the city around them in buildings that were massive and muscular, with bold, often rough concrete forms designed to float, as if by magic, over the earth. Below are 10 of the city’s essential architectural experiences, presented in no particular order.

1. Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, University of São Paulo (FAU-USP)

Designed in 1961 by João Batista Vilanova Artigas, widely considered the father of Paulista Modernism, the seat of the state university’s school of architecture is almost certainly the most iconic building in São Paulo. Centered around a soaring, light-filled atrium, the building is porous; the ground floor has open walkways instead of external doors and the top-floor studios are divided only by low concrete partitions, allowing students to interact and learn freely from one another. The high point of Artigas’s architectural career, the FAU-USP was also a powerful expression of his communist ideals. Since its opening in 1969 — five years after a U.S.-backed military dictatorship took power in Brazil — the school has shaped generations of architects who’ve taken the curriculum’s focus on shared urban space back out into the city at large.