Logbook · higienopolis
Seventy-seven years of Higienópolis in twenty addresses
From 1948 to 2025, the archive holds twenty buildings in a single neighborhood. Read in order, they tell how São Paulo changed its mind about what it means to live well.
The building that arrived too early
Start with the oldest, because it already answers the question.
In 1944 Prudência e Capitalização commissioned Rino Levi, with Roberto Cerqueira César and Luís Roberto Carvalho Franco, an apartment building for a plot of almost four thousand square meters on Avenida Higienópolis. The work was finished in 1948. It brought heating and cooling controlled compartment by compartment, central hot water, its own generator and a playground on the ground floor, items the city had never seen in a residential building.
But what matters in Prudência is not the equipment. It is the open plan: inside the apartment, only the bathrooms, the kitchen and the circulation cores had a fixed place, and everything else was defined by movable partitions the resident could rearrange.
The idea was too radical. According to the architects’ own accounts, every buyer refused the movable partitions, with a single exception; the rest raised masonry over the axes of the module. Seventy-seven years later, the customizable plan would return to the neighborhood as a selling argument, in the last building on this list.
The interval in which no one signed
After Prudência comes Soberano, from 1954, and Carinás, from 1961. In 1962, Helenita, by Jorge Zalszupin with Henrique Alexander: a glass box with a navy-blue façade, sixteen families and a single apartment per floor, with access over a canopy suspended above a reflecting pool. It is Zalszupin’s only residential work in Higienópolis recorded in the city’s architecture archives.
And then something happens that you only see when all twenty are side by side.
Between 1974 and 2002, none of the eleven buildings in the archive in this neighborhood has documented authorship. Barão de Pirapitingui and Palma di Montechiaro in 1974, Torre d’Oro in 1987, Castello del Sole and Mangabeiras in 1991, Coral Bay in 1995, Monte D’oro in 1996, King David and Paradiso Higienópolis in 1998, The Gables in 1999, Sharon Tower in 2002. Twenty-eight years, eleven addresses, and the architect field blank in every one.
This is not a gap in the archive. It is the portrait of a period in which the São Paulo residential building was a developer’s product, not a signed work. The name that sold was the development’s, and the author of the design did not enter the advertisement because it was not an argument. When a record does not attribute authorship, it is saying that it found no source, and the absence repeated eleven times in a row, in the same neighborhood and the same interval, is itself a piece of data.
The signature returns, and returns as a sale
Castagneto, from 2004, is still anonymous. But in 2008 Île de Soleil brings Patricia Anastassiadis, and from then on all of them have a name: Castelbianco with Felippe Crescenti in 2019, The Class Higienópolis with JNA Arquitetos in 2023, and Casa Higienópolis with Itamar Berezin in 2025, by Think, with interiors by Chris Silveira and landscaping by Benedito Abbud.
The difference between 1962 and 2025 is not that one has an architect and the other does not. It is what saying his name is for. In Zalszupin, the signature was an archival fact, recovered later. In Casa Higienópolis, it is in the launch material.
What the neighborhood never stopped being
It is worth noticing what did not change in seventy-seven years.
Prudência occupies almost four thousand square meters of land on Avenida Higienópolis. Casa Higienópolis presents itself as a contemporary lighthouse raised over the historic townhouses, with a view of the green areas of Pacaembu. The two sell the same thing: being above the neighborhood without leaving it. It is the argument Higienópolis has offered since it existed, and it is why the arc is so long here and not in Moema or Itaim Bibi, where the archive begins in the 1990s.
And there is a detail of Prudência that closes it well. Part of the original landscaping by Burle Marx was sacrificed in a later renovation of the ground floor, to open more parking spaces. The tiles he painted in the lobby remain.
Seventy-seven years later, the neighborhood is still doing that math.
