Sao Paulo Steps Up

In Brazil's largest mega-metropolis, Michael Snyder finds an insatiable, multicultural energy that feels more modern, more appealing, than ever.

- By Michael Snyder

When Avenida Paulista, São Paulo's most famous thoroughfare, first unfurled across a 328-foot-high ridge south of the city center in 1891, it represented, for the people who settled there, an escape from the bustle and heat of a newly booming provincial town. At the time, São Paulo was home to some 65,000 people, an upstart trading post for the surrounding coffee plantations. But as exports exploded in the late 1800s, the city began to grow. Paulista provided fresh air, a wide promenade, and huge plots of land where coffee barons and industrialists built mansions in an eclectic pastiche of imported styles. It was also, as the architect and photographer André Scarpa told me on a humid summer morning in February, an attempt to emulate the life of the country inside the city.

As we slipped through the crowds that flowed down Paulista, surrounded by skyscrapers and traffic, I had to laugh. This boulevard, after all, is the spinal cord of a city of 22 million people that makes Mexico City (where I live) seem quaint. Here was the glass-and-concrete prism of Lina Bo Bardi's epoch-defining São Paulo Museum of Art, or MASP, suspended over an open plaza. Barely a block away, architect Rino Levi's pyramidal FIESP Cultural Center leaned coolly back among its straight-shouldered neighbors. Nearby, the slick façade of the Paulicéia building, designed by French émigré Jacques Pilón and Gian Carlo Gasperini (an Italo-Brazilian, like Levi and Bo Bardi), faced off against the sly horizontal stripes of the Torre Paulista building by José Gugliotta and Polish-born Jorge Zalszupin. There may be no metropolis on earth more defiantly modern.