Higienópolis in three buildings: Artigas, Rino Levi and Artacho Jurado

The most cited case stands on Praça Vilaboim. The Louveira building, completed in 1946, was designed by João Batista Vilanova Artigas with his former student Carlos Cascaldi. It is made of two parallel slabs, one of seven floors and one of six, joined by an inner garden. The pilotis lift the blocks off the ground and leave the ground floor to circulation and greenery, so that anyone crossing the square sees the garden run through the plot.

The idea of an open ground floor, treated as shared space, would stay with Artigas throughout his career. At the Louveira it is already complete. The building is listed by Condephaat at state level and by Conpresp at municipal level. In 2019 the municipal council reversed a decision that would have allowed taller buildings around the square, precisely to preserve how the building reads from the street.

A few blocks away, on Avenida Higienópolis, the Prudência building carries a different signature. Designed by Rino Levi with his partner Roberto Cerqueira César in the 1940s, it has a ground-floor garden by Roberto Burle Marx, who extended the planting beneath the pilotis and over the garage slab. Levi and Burle Marx were friends and collaborators for decades. At the Prudência, the landscape stops being a frame and becomes part of the arrival.

The third building calls for another way of looking. The Bretagne, completed at the end of the 1950s, is the work of João Artacho Jurado, a builder without an architecture degree who designed and built his own buildings. Where Artigas and Levi sought restraint, Jurado bet on colour, decorative detail and shapes that strayed from the modernist rulebook. For a long time critics kept their distance. Today the Bretagne is visited, photographed and studied as a chapter of its own in São Paulo modernism.

Different as they are, the three arrive at a similar answer to the same question: how to live high up without losing the ground. Pilotis, gardens that take over the ground floor and blocks set back from the street handle the transition between pavement and home. It is a courtesy to passers-by and a privilege for residents, because the way in starts among plants rather than at a gate.

That legacy helps explain why Higienópolis has aged well. Many buildings from the following decades repeated the formula of the planted setback and the generous ground floor, and the neighbourhood's tree-lined streets gained a continuity that is rare in São Paulo's expanded centre.

For those who live in Higienópolis, this architecture is not a weekend outing. It is on the way to the cafés of Praça Vilaboim, on the pavement of Avenida Higienópolis, in the view of anyone stepping out in the morning. Living in the neighbourhood means living close to one of the city's finest lessons in residential architecture.