Thesis title: LA CASA A SÃO PAULO TRA ARTIFICIO E NATURA
The thesis proposes a reflection on housing in São Paulo, Brazil, during the second half of the twentieth century. The scope of the investigation is limited to the theme of the single-family house, focusing on architects who are less known internationally. This choice is made to explore a type of society shaped by a strong ethnic mix, which underwent significant collective development during the years of the military dictatorship. During that period, any form of expression—especially in the arts—was abolished, and architecture, positioned between art and science, became a powerful vehicle for conveying a strong social message. For this reason, analytical tools are developed to interpret the case studies under examination.
The structure of the text is divided into five parts: the first two provide a geographical and historical framework, the third presents the case studies, and the fourth and fifth focus on interpretation and synthesis.
The first chapter contextualizes the city of São Paulo within Brazil. The metropolis is spatially located, and its orographic and climatic characteristics are defined. This is followed by an examination of urban growth and how urban planning, over the years, failed to keep up with a rapidly growing population and increasing demands not only for residential development but also for the city's infrastructure. The theme of cultural diversity is explored in section 1.3, where the collective identity of São Paulo’s inhabitants and the roots of its vast socio-cultural variety are analyzed. The chapter concludes with an in-depth look at the Paulista School and how architectural design became a means of conveying political and social messages in opposition to the military dictatorship.
The second chapter delves into the theme of housing, starting from the colonization of Brazil.
First, the concept of the fazenda is explored, analyzing how the housing model was integrated with the intensive agricultural activities of coffee and sugarcane cultivation. With urban expansion, the countryside began to depopulate, and large masses of people migrated to the rapidly evolving city in search of new and better opportunities. São Paulo then saw the construction of new single-family homes, which, meant to represent the importance of the families inhabiting them, adopted decorative elements from French Art Nouveau and Liberty styles. From the 1940s onwards, alongside the construction of individual housing units, the first high-rise residential buildings began to emerge, marking the beginning of vertical residential development in the city.
The new garden neighborhood models, discussed in the section on urban expansion, became the areas where single-family houses were built. The case studies analyzed in this research were designed by architects who shared the ideological message of Vilanova Artigas, as promoted at the Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo of the Universidade de São Paulo (FAU USP). Therefore, a dedicated section examines the connection between the house and the urban environment. The Paulista architectural vision is expressed as a desire to build a strong collective identity, rooted in social aggregation, integration, and learning.
Following the geographical, historical, and architectural premise, the third chapter presents nine selected houses. The chapter's introduction explains the criteria for selecting the case studies and the common elements that make this selection the core of the research. For each analyzed house, a volumetric and spatial interpretation of the architecture is provided, along with a broader contextualization regarding the neighborhood and the site's orographic features.
A selection of significant images—including historical photos from archives and more recent ones—both of the exterior and interior, along with redrawn plans and sections made possible through archival research, accompanies the architectural descriptions. This chapter concludes the objective part of the research, laying the groundwork for the interpretative analysis that follows.
In "Architectural Grammar," analytical tools are proposed to aid in reading the houses, ultimately forming a general methodology for interpreting all examples that share the same geographical, social, and historical premises as the nine case studies. The method of "disassembly" is employed for the analysis of these houses, breaking them down into individual components so that each can be examined separately before reassembling them into a cohesive whole. The study is presented as the separation of key architectural elements, which are then represented on transparent sheets. The superimposition of these sheets visually reconstructs the composition of the architecture in reverse.
The primary analytical tool used in the study is the sectional perspective drawing. Section 4.2 explains the reasons for choosing this representational method and how it is applied to each case study. The section runs longitudinally through the house, establishing a connection between the street and the garden at the back, creating a path through the most significant spaces of each architectural work.
Key architectural elements such as the relationship with the ground, voided spaces, light, greenery, and structural components are analyzed in corresponding sections, with a unique interpretative reading for each house.
In the final conclusions, the thesis revisits its key points and interprets the architecture of the examined period as “honest.” The study of these homes is compared to contemporary residential contexts, questioning how today’s architecture might learn from Brazil’s architectural past. The research remains open-ended, pondering a possible fusion between contemporary housing—shaped by globalization and the digital world—and the more authentic and honest architecture of the dictatorship era.