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.

2. SESC Pompéia

For her contribution to São Paulo’s SESC system — a group of nonprofit cultural centers founded in 1946 by a network of local business leaders — the Italian-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi created a multiuse public space that is as efficient and functional as it is joyous and dynamic. Inside are exhibition halls, sports facilities, a theater, a library and open areas that have remained in constant use since the project’s completion in 1986. Set, in part, in a former steel-drum factory, the building is a successful early example of adaptive reuse. It demonstrates not only the diversity of Bo Bardi’s aesthetic interests — compare the heavy concrete and the amoeba-shaped windows of the complex’s sports center to the limpid grace of 1951’s Casa de Vidro, the architect’s own home — but also her deep commitment to creating an inclusive city.

3. Avenida Paulista, from the Gazeta Building to IMS

Few streets on earth are more densely packed with Modernist masterpieces than Avenida Paulista, São Paulo’s grandest thoroughfare. An ideal walk (particularly on a Sunday, when cars are banned) begins in the southeast by the graphic concrete relief of the 1966 Gazeta Building and ends about a mile to the northwest at Andrade Morettin’s elegant Instituto Moreira Salles museum, completed in 2017. On the way, you’ll pass the leaning pyramidal facade of Rino Levi’s late-career FIESP Cultural Center (1979); the immense white slab of David Libeskind’s 1962 Conjunto Nacional, which epitomized Paulista’s transformation from a 19th-century garden boulevard into the city’s financial heart; and Bo Bardi’s São Paulo Museum of Art, or MASP (1968), a Brutalist prism raised over an open plaza by a pair of concrete brackets.

4. The Copan

A giant tilde-shaped building containing 1,160 apartments and 70 businesses, the Copan is so big that it has its own postal code. It’s also the best known building in São Paulo by Brazil’s most famous architect, Oscar Niemeyer. Like the surrounding República neighborhood and much of the city’s center, the building fell on hard times in the 1970s, less than a decade after it opened, as many wealthy residents moved to the suburbs. But in the past decade, the Copan, with its 38 stories rising over the bustling shops and bars at street level, has become an emblem of República’s halting and complex re-emergence as a hub for artists, writers, restaurateurs and gallerists.

5. Avenida Higienópolis

Developed in the late 19th century as an airy suburb on a hill above the cramped city center, Higienópolis (whose name translates to Hygiene City) has been home since the mid-20th century to a cluster of dazzling residential buildings that belie São Paulo’s reputation as a sea of gray. A walk along Avenida Higienópolis — which runs for less than three-quarters of a mile — takes you past a procession of graceful apartment blocks designed by a who’s who of Paulista Modernists, from Franz Heep’s 1953 Lausanne Building, with its sliding red, white and green shutters, to the sculptural pillars and ribbonlike rooftop canopy of João Artacho Jurado’s flamboyant Bretagne Building, completed a few years later.

6. Minhocão

São Paulo is famous for its snarled traffic and hostility to pedestrians, problems exemplified by the approximately two-mile-long elevated highway known as the Minhocão, or “Big Worm,” which first opened in 1971. Over the decades, local residents and urbanists have gradually changed the highway’s use, first shutting it down at night, after noise complaints arose in the late 1970s and then, in 1990, extending those closures to Sundays. Since 2018, for the entirety of each weekend, the Minhocão has been transformed into an improbable park. A leisurely walk along the roughly half-mile stretch between Santa Cecilia Metro, in Higienópolis, and Roosevelt Park, not far from the Copan, offers disorienting views of the city’s jagged skyline and of about 40 murals painted since 2017 as part of a public art program.

7. Brazilian Museum of Sculpture and Ecology (MuBE)

Vilanova Artigas might be the father of Paulista Modernism, but Paulo Mendes da Rocha, who died in 2021 at 92, crystallized the city’s aesthetic with formally rigorous buildings that seem to defy physics. No public-facing project distills his approach more concisely than the Brazilian Museum of Sculpture and Ecology, or MuBE. Situated mostly below street level, it consists of an open plaza, cavelike galleries and gardens designed by Roberto Burle Marx, who died a year before the museum’s completion in 1995, all traversed by a breathtaking 197-foot span of concrete.

8. Mendes Wood Gallery

São Paulo has no shortage of galleries set in graceful spaces designed by notable architects: There’s Luciana Brito, which occupies a Modernist house by Rino Levi, and Galería Leme, with its concrete bunker designed by Mendes da Rocha and Metro Arquitetos. But Mendes Wood stands out. In 2021, the gallery moved to its primary location in a former industrial space dating to the 1940s, converted by the São Paulo-based architects Marina Acayaba and Juan Pablo Rosenberg, who used ethereal white walls to divide the space into smaller galleries, some of which open to the building’s lofty, arched ceiling. Two years later, Mendes Wood opened a satellite space in a curvaceous Modernist house designed by Warchavchik in 1952.

9. Apartamento 61

In the early 2010s, the journalist Vivian Lobato and her partner, the graphic designer André Visockis, started accumulating furniture for their São Paulo apartment. Soon, they’d assembled a considerable collection of pieces by renowned makers like Lina Bo Bardi, Sergio Rodrigues, Jorge Zalszupin and José Zanine Caldas. Architects as well as designers, these figures gave shape to a Brazilian aesthetic as immediately identifiable and covetable as those associated with renowned design capitals like Japan, Italy and Denmark. The only logical thing to do, Lobato and Visockis realized, was open a gallery. Since 2014, Apartamento 61 — named in homage to their first home — has presented these objects alongside works from contemporary creators in a series of remarkable spaces, most recently a luminous, warehouselike building completed in 2022 by the architect Felipe Hess.

10. Pinacoteca

The Pinacoteca, which houses an expansive collection of Brazilian art dating from the 1800s to the present, occupies a late-19th-century building in the Jardim da Luz at the gritty northern edge of the city center. Originally designed as a school for arts and crafts, the building, adapted as an exhibition space in 1905, was never fully completed, its columns and rough masonry pediments left exposed to the city’s tropical climate. In 1998, Paulo Mendes da Rocha intervened, adding oxidized metal bridges to the sunlit neo-Classical atria. A new wing by Arquitetos Associados, opened in 2023, has expanded the museum’s scope to include galleries for contemporary art, but it’s Mendes da Rocha’s work — a master class in juxtaposing the contemporary with the historic — that makes this one of the city’s most expressive buildings.