Reading MASP as a Work of Urban Design

The Museu de Arte São Paulo (1968), or MASP, by the architect Lina Bo Bardi, is widely and rightly recognized for its radical reimagination of what a museum could be and do, extending to its groundbreaking interior display system, recently reinstalled. Although architecturally distinct from its surroundings, MASP is equally important as a deeply contextual work of urban design that established a new present and future for collective life in the area, especially through its covered plaza. Moreover, MASP does so within the spatially loose environment of Avenida Paulista. Introduced by the urban historian Lewis Mumford, the term “spatial looseness” described the “breakup of the old urban forms,” such as Boston’s or São Paulo’s traditional urban core, into “a new type of open plan and a new distribution of urban functions.”¹ Mumford’s interest is a specific kind of modern, Western, primarily residential suburbanization focused on living in nature. However, the more open forms of twentieth century US development—characterized especially by more space in-between buildings and “object” buildings in the round—are also found in much urbanization worldwide that often has little to do with nature and creates different urban design conditions. MASP is an object in a field of other objects, and exemplary of the building as a work of urban design in a spatially loose context.²

Spatially Loose Avenida Paulista

Contemporary São Paulo is a dramatic human-made environment—a metropolis of approximately 22 million people characterized by seemingly endless, dispersed skyscrapers. In his “Preface” to the São Paulo Architectural Guide, Fabio Valentim cites a 1973 amendment to São Paulo’s zoning code that “incentivize[d]…the single-purpose building, without commerce, protected by setbacks on all sides and occupying only 25% of the project plot” as a primary contributor to this vast field.³ But a more open spatial pattern predates tall buildings in São Paulo, and tall buildings predate the 1973 amendment; indeed, looseness is established early and reinforced often, evident in the evolution of Avenida Paulista, one of São Paulo’s most important streets. Perhaps counterintuitively, Avenida Paulista has also developed high levels of density over time, producing a contemporary environment that, like many other parts of the metropolis, is at once loose and dense.

Upon his purchase of the “Sítio do Capão” in 1880, Mariano Antonio Vieira developed a path called the Rua da Real Grandeza along the ridge of the watershed between the Pinheiros and Tietē Rivers, the highest point of the area. After Vieira sold portions of this land, three of those new owners—Joaquim Eugênio de Lima, José Borges de Figueiredo, and João Augusto Garcia—subsequently extended and improved the path into a tree-lined boulevard inspired by European streets. Jules Martin’s watercolor of Avenida Paulista upon its inauguration in December 1891 shows a dirt road with a wide central aisle for horse-drawn carriages, flanked by narrower side aisles, one of which has tracks for a horsecar, and sidewalks.⁴ Small, regularly spaced trees delimit each aisle. The lands adjacent to the road are empty of human occupation, except for smaller perpendicular roads signaling its imminent gridded subdivision.

While an early suggestion was to name the road after de Lima, he recommended it be called Avenida Paulista “in honor of all São Paulo residents.”⁵ In distinct contrast, mansions quickly sprouted along it, and within twenty-eight months of its inauguration, Avenida Paulista’s exclusivity was protected by a series of new city laws. Some regulated land use, banning “the movement of cattle” (Law No. 100, 1894), the presence of stables (Law No. 325, 1897) and the “establishment” of factories (Law No. 960, 1906) along the street; in addition, commercial uses were limited except with a license from City Hall (Law No. 626, 1903).⁶

Other early laws originated the road’s spatially loose DNA, requiring minimum front setbacks of ten meters from the property line “for garden[s] or trees” and minimum side setbacks of two meters (Law No. 111, 1894).⁷ By 1902, a historic photo showed a stretch of the maturing tree-lined street already filling with large houses, most of which were set at or close to the minimum front setback, creating a consistent street frontage.⁸ Many of the lots were also comparatively narrow, which in combination with the shallow side setbacks produced an unexpected degree of low-rise physical density simultaneous to the more open spatial pattern. In 1908, Avenida Paulista was the first road in the city to be paved, further reinforcing its importance.

At the midpoint of Avenida Paulista was Parque Villon (1892, later renamed Tenente Siqueria Campos Park), a preserved stand of the original Caaguassú Forest that once blanketed the area. Directly across the street from the park was the Trianon, a commercial zoning exception housing an elite social club that Lina Bo Bardi would later characterize as a “political center” for the city.⁹ Opened in 1916, the Trianon was a large, classical building designed by Ramos de Azevedo, the name of which explicitly recalled Versailles.¹⁰ Due in part to the steep slope of the site, the enclosed parts of the Trianon were largely below the level of the road, with entry through a pavilion in the center of its inhabitable roof. Accessed by seven steps up from the street, that “Belvedere” roof provided clear views of the Saracura stream in the then-rural Anhangabaú Valley below and São Paulo’s traditionally urban core beyond. Photographs of the Trianon from this timeframe also show Avenida Paulista’s increasing density, as the long and narrow lots near the Trianon were further subdivided from front to back, producing two-deep mansions while maintaining mandatory setbacks. The view from the Anhangabaú Valley back to the building was also dramatic, and made more accessible upon the opening of the Avenida Nove de Julho road and tunnels under the Trianon, connecting downtown São Paulo to neighborhoods to the southwest in the late 1930s/early 1940s. Together, the Trianon building and Nove de Julho tunnels were effectively the imposing visual “terminus” of a (slightly askew) classical urban axis proposed in Francisco Prestes Maia’s 1930 Avenues Plan for the City of São Paulo.

A few years after the Trianon opened, and in the midst of a period of tremendous city growth, São Paulo implemented a new “municipal standard for private buildings” (Law No. 2332, 1920), which consolidated and expanded upon previous legislation into what was effectively a combined building and zoning code.¹¹ For the first time, the city was divided into four zones, for which standards often differed, and the effect on urban form was to reinforce tightness in the center and looseness elsewhere. In the first/central zone—which included the densest “Commercial Triangle” area—zoning requirements were traditionally urban, such as zero-meter front setbacks (Art. 16) and higher allowable lot coverage (Art. 85). In contrast, in the second/urban zone—which included Avenida Paulista—and the third/suburban zone, front setbacks were a minimum of four meters (Art. 17), unless special conditions applied, such as on Avenida Paulista, where the minimum front setback remained ten meters (Art. 19). Moreover, the maximum allowable lot coverage was lower than in the first/central zone (Art. 85).

The new standard also introduced requirements for light and air, mandating sunlight to certain areas of the ground or first floor on the shortest day of the year for minimum amounts of time (Art. 70-72). In addition, allowable building heights were introduced based on a ratio to the adjacent road, the maximum of which could be three times the width of a road more than twelve meters (Art. 67)—i.e. 36 meters or taller—eventually resulting in the thirteen-story Edifício Sampaio Moreira (1924) and twenty-story Edifício Martinelli (c. 1928/29). While few tall buildings were being built, especially outside the center, an expectation of increased height was now embedded in the law, which in combination with light and air requirements codified more space in-between buildings and a more open pattern throughout the second/urban and third/suburban zones. For the moment, the effects on Avenida Paulista were negligible because it was technically still limited to single-family houses. However, significant changes were on the horizon, presaged in part by a grouping of three, seemingly non-conforming institutional buildings at the Rua Teixeira da Silva intersection at the southeastern end of Avenida Paulista: Instituto Pasteur (1903), Sanatorio de Santa Catharina (1906), and Grupo Escolar Rodrigues Alves (1919). In addition, other large institutions were located just a block or two off the Avenue, including Instituto Paulista, Instituto Medio Dante Alighieri, Hospital Umberto I, Abadia de Santa Maria, and Convento dos Capuchinhos.¹²

In 1934, the city issued a revised code that, with a few exceptions, dramatically raised the maximum height to eighty meters for almost all buildings along public roads in the city (Art. 181, Law No. 663, 1934). Three years later, multi-family residential buildings were allowed on Avenida Paulista for the first time, provided they incorporated increased side setbacks of 3 meters minimum (Art. 3, Law No. 3571, 1937). The first result of these significant combined changes was the Edifício Anchieta (1941–1948) by MMM Roberto, located on the northern corner of the intersection with Rua da Consolação. Considered “[o]ne of the first representatives of modern architecture in São Paulo,”¹³ Anchieta was a thin, L-shaped bar comprised of a two-story base set behind the building’s outer perimeter of columns and 72 apartments across ten stories above. One story of enclosed parking extended to the rear of the site, the roof of which was a playground. As required, the building was set back from each road, still evident on Avenida Angélica where it retains its deep garden, now behind a tall fence. In the early 1970s, however, Avenida Paulista was widened, thus eliminating that setback and bringing the road edge much closer to the building.¹⁴

While commercial buildings on Avenida Paulista had been allowed on a case-by-case basis since 1903, the street’s character shifted again in 1952, when “hospitals, educational establishments, press, radio, television, theater, and cinema establishments” were made as-of-right (Art. 4, Law No. 4313, 1952). And while not explicitly stated, the law was seemingly interpreted as permitting as-of-right officing and more extensive retail as well. Reflecting growing automobile use, the same law introduced required underground parking with a minimum ratio of one space per 500 square meters of “useful constructed area” (Art. 5).¹⁵

Two notable early mixed-use projects on the avenue materialized these changes. The Edifício Nações Unidas (1953–59) by Abelardo Riedy de Souza was “one of the first works in the process of verticalization and diversification of use on Paulista Avenue, beyond an exclusively residential program.”¹⁶ It had a ground level retail base accessed by a through-floor arcade—a central city requirement now expanded to Avenida Paulista—with 430 apartments above and a 250-car garage underground, and like the Edifício Anchieta, the front garden in the required setback was eliminated when Avenida Paulista was widened in the 1970s. Conjunto Nacional (1954–59) by David Libeskind added other aspects to the street’s programmatic mix. It, too, had a porous ground level retail base, now three-stories tall and filling its massive city block—yet still beholden to mandatory setbacks—as well as underground parking and housing in the vertical slab above. In addition, there was a large movie theater within the base, restaurants on the roof of the base, and officing in the slab.¹⁷ A hotel was proposed as part of the slab but not built.¹⁸ Construction photos show a handful of other new, taller projects in the background, although none nearly so large as Conjunto Nacional, and as the city expanded rapidly over the next few years, the construction of tall buildings accelerated, dramatically changing the character of Avenida Paulista while maintaining its looseness.

Parque Tenente Siqueria Campos and the Trianon’s roof provided some limited collective space on Avenida Paulista, but like the street itself, were likely perceived as highly exclusive. Although the Trianon’s tenants changed over time, its roof remained open until 1951, when a temporary pavilion was built upon it for the 1st Bienal de São Paulo, organized by the Museu de Modern Arte Sāo Paulo (MAM-SP). Upon the art exhibition’s conclusion, the plan was to replace the entire Trianon with a new permanent building for MAM-SP by the architect Affonso Eduardo Reidy.¹⁹

The Trianon was torn down in anticipation; however, MAM-SP was unable to find funding, the project was cancelled, and the site was left vacant.²⁰ According to Bo Bardi, “one afternoon [in 1957], while I was passing this [site], I realized that this was the only place to build the São Paulo Museum of Art, the only site, in view of its special place in the popular imagination, worthy of housing the first museum of art in Latin America.”²¹ Later that same year, Bo Bardi made an initial proposal for the new MASP on the site, which would replace its existing location within the nearby Diários Associados Building. After a pause, design work began in 1960 and the new MASP would eventually open in 1968 within an “urban context of transformation.”²²

MASP as a work of urban design

Although Bo Bardi was a modernist who “loved” the work of Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer,²³ “she was not convinced by th[at] trajectory of Brazilian modern architecture”—often termed the Rio or Carioca School—“and defended Max Bill’s condemnation of its expressive formalism,” as well as Bill’s argument that architecture must reflect “human needs.”²⁴ This position was further informed by her time teaching architectural history and theory at the School of Fine Arts in Salvador from 1958 until 1964, where, as Esther da Costa Meyer argued, her engagement with the socioeconomic and ethnic diversity of the region, as well as the range of intellectuals and artists there, provided a “transformative” experience that pushed her politics “further left.”²⁵ Bo Bardi characterized her time in Salvador as “a lesson of popular experience, not as folkloric romanticism but as an experiment in simplification,”²⁶ and as a result, her work materialized what she called “poor architecture, not in the sense of impoverished but in the artisanal sense of achieving the maximum communication and dignity with minimal, humble means.”²⁷ Her term “Arquitetura Pobre” was tied to director Jerzy Grotowski’s “Teatro Pobre” and curator Germano Celant’s “Arte Povera,” “[e]ach [of which] called for a stripping away and downgrading of things to a minimum in order to reveal the deep riches, which lie at the very core of the art form.”²⁸ This approach also had some alignment with the Paulista School, the architects of which—best represented by Vilanova Artigas—“designed with a predilection for simple forms, raw, unfinished materials, and exposed service pipes, expressions of moderation they regarded as appropriate for a developing country.”²⁹

Within this context, Bo Bardi’s essay “The New Trianon,” published in 1967 during the ascension of postmodernism, argued for what she considered critical relationships among modernism, monumentality, and collectivity at MASP: “Through its monumental simplicity, the Trianon complex will re-propose the—now highly unpopular—themes of rationalism. Above all, it will draw a clear distinction between the ‘monumental’ (in the civic-collective sense) and the ‘elephantine.’” She argued that big dimensions were not the key aspect of monumentalism, saying the Parthenon is not all that big but is monumental, while Fascist buildings are “elephantine, in all their bloated arrogance, their defiance of logic.” Instead, she argued the monumental “relates to a sense of collectivity, that is, a collective consciousness. Anything that goes beyond the ‘particular,’ reaching out to the collective, can (and perhaps should) be monumental.”³⁰

This focus on “monumental” collectivity was foundational to the urban design of the new museum. The city “required the building to maintain an open urban panorama”—basically a new belvedere—to the valley below and the city core beyond.³¹ Bo Bardi’s response was twofold: to double down on the idea of the inhabitable roof, and to introduce a monumental frame that further connected the project to the city. As the Trianon had done, Bo Bardi “semi-buried” a portion of the building into the steep slope of the site, creating a base that housed two auditoria and an event space “for public and political gatherings,” and making its roof inhabitable.³² But unlike the Trianon, which was raised seven steps from the street and limited entry to two locations, this new roof “plaza” was effectively contiguous with and open to the wide, adjacent public sidewalk, providing seamless and expansive access, including to the rear edge with the best views.

From the outset at MASP, Bo Bardi explicitly imagined the cobblestone plaza as a place of both “high” and popular culture that anyone could access, asserting that she “would like the public to go there to see open air exhibitions and discuss things, listen to music, see movies. Children too, playing in the sun, from morning to evening. And brass band concerts. A somewhat bad taste in popular music which, when faced coldly, may also be a ‘content.’”³³ She sketched a possible sculpture exhibition, later materialized in Nelson Leirner’s Playgrounds, the first outdoor art exhibition on the plaza in 1969, as well as a traveling circus tent, which was installed in 1972. The resulting plaza was “a space of freedom”³⁴ for the city, including for those “almost entirely excluded from it in previous years.”³⁵

Although architecture in Brazil was and is overwhelmingly realized in concrete because it is readily available and affordable, for Bo Bardi, materiality was more so a conceptual choice. Her own Glass House (1951) was well known for its use of slim steel columns, but at MASP, concrete was the primary means of materializing her ideas. Above the plaza, Bo Bardi designed a thick frame, the visible components of which comprised four big, board-formed, raw concrete columns connected in length by two deep, prestressed, raw concrete beams at the roof, from which the glass box containing the primary exhibition spaces of the museum appeared to hang.³⁶ Bo Bardi’s early drawings show that thick frame worked in both directions; from the street, it framed a view of the city beyond, while looking back at the museum from the belvedere’s edge it framed a view of the preserved Caaguassú Forest of the public park across the street. The visual connection to the park was reinforced physically by the way Bo Bardi brought flora to MASP—as though the forest had been pulled across the street—integrating deep concrete planters along the belvedere’s edge and along most of each “underground” floor of the base. Because the planters overhung the continuous ribbon glazing of each floor, they provided some architectural solar control. The resulting deep reveal also reinforced the horizontality of the alternating strata of board-formed raw concrete and glass, producing a topographical reading, especially as the floors negotiated the steep slope and narrowing site. Today, a dense edge of flora, including a few trees, lines most of the three levels of the base, creating moments in the interior of feeling embedded within the plants. From the plaza, tall trees on neighboring land substantiate the sense of the park’s extended flora and the framed view of the valley below, now seemingly filled with buildings. The exposed concrete elements of the frame were painted red in 1990, further reinforcing its shape.³⁷

Common in modernist projects throughout the world, pilotis and a free ground plane are also commonly critiqued as a detriment to active street life, an often universalist charge for a purportedly universalist condition. Yet circumstances—and design!—matter. The covered spaces they shape are particularly important in hot and wet climates such as Brazil, where they provide critical environmental protection. At MASP, Bo Bardi effectively supersized both to create the thick frame with a 70-meter-wide x 29-meter-deep x 8-meter-tall, covered space often called the “free span.” Although the overall plaza is only about fifty percent larger than the Trianon’s roof, it reads as far more expansive, in large part due to the frame and the span. Any given day finds micro-vendors, those seeking shelter from the weather, informal jam sessions, and homeless folks asleep on mats, among others, alongside Paulistas and tourists in line at the museum’s more recent outdoor box office and secured entrance. In the summer at least, few people seem to venture to the “far” edge, instead staying under the span. At the same time, images from the large gatherings that occur at the plaza show people first congregate under the span, near the street. Here, the “monumental” literally and conceptually shapes the collective.

Upon its completion, MASP established a street edge much closer to Avenida Paulista than the remaining old mansions or burgeoning new skyscrapers, creating high visibility up and down the avenue; Bo Bardi must have negotiated this singular condition with the city, as it was decidedly at odds with mandatory setbacks. That proximity was amplified when the street was widened in the 1970s, bringing the road edge so close to the building that it almost seems to touch, establishing the visual and spatial experience still in place today. A secondary urban connection was made with a wide stair that provided direct access to and from the civic hall, library, and restaurant in the lowest level of the base to Rua Carlos Comenale below, although this stair is no longer used for access to the museum. The MASP stair also visually aligned with an existing stair across the traffic circle that provided access to the inhabitable top of the Nove de Julho tunnels. In total, this sequence of base to stair to street to stair to the top of the tunnel produced a striking new version of the once-classical visual ‘terminus’ of the road below. Unfortunately, that view from the valley is now obscured by a disruptive bridge built in close proximity to the tunnel openings.

MASP’s focus on collectivity also shaped life beyond its immediate edges, attracting to Avenida Paulista an increasing number of cultural buildings, including FIESPP (1979) by architects Roberto Cerqueira César and Luiz Roberto Carvalho Franco with a 1998 renovation by Paulo Mendes da Rocha and MMBB; Itaú Cultural Institute (1989); and more recently, Japan House (2017) by Kengo Kuma, Instituto Moreira Salles (2017) by Andrade Morettin Arquitetos, and a next-door extension to MASP (2024) by Metro Arquitetos. Other changes reinforcing the collective qualities of the street included the 1991 opening of the Line 2-Green subway built under the length of Avenida Paulista, with the Trianon-Masp station near the museum, and the 2016 introduction of pedestrian-only Sundays, compellingly conveyed in Ciro Miguel’s 2020 short film. Avenida Paulista is now one of São Paulo’s most active and public streets.

Despite extensive change, including continually evolving zoning codes, Avenida Paulista remains spatially loose, even as that reading is more subtle today. The mansions that once lined the avenue were clearly separated from the street and each other, but the nascent grid provided early organizational structure. The current pattern of buildings is obviously much taller, and perhaps also because the primary ground surface comprises wide, often active sidewalks, at first glance may seem conventionally urban, especially as the grid remains. However, a closer look shows buildings maintain separation from each other—there are no exterior party walls here!—producing, much like the mansions, a more open spatial pattern. Within that context, MASP remains deeply situated by Bo Bardi’s ideas about modernism, the site’s history and topography, and the collective typologies of the adjacent streets and park, and since it is not beholden to or dependent on the architecture of its neighboring buildings, it weathered dramatic changes in the surrounding environment without compromising its disciplinary clarity and urban significance. Likewise, MASP’s primary collective space was shaped through the building up of an object within a fabric of other objects rather than the carving out of a void from a traditionally contiguous urban fabric, like Praça da República in downtown São Paulo. In an evolving, spatially loose environment, the collective life enabled by MASP, especially its covered plaza, shows potentials of the building as a work of urban design.