French architectural works help retell the story of São Paulo

Researcher chooses the careeer of Jacques Pilon as the thread to study the construction of the city.

By Frances Jones

Agência FAPESP –  A diploma in architecture from the renowned École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, an inheritance, and an diary full of contacts representing the cream of São Paulo society in the early twentieth century: with these items, French architect Jacques Pilon (1905 – 1962) arrived in Brazil with his family in 1932. A year later, he had opened an office in São Paulo, where for almost three decades he would operate in the real estate market – as an architect, developer and investor – actively participating in the construction of the metropolis. 

Responsible for hundreds of projects – particularly office towersin the downtown area – Pilon has not been given much prestige in architectural historiography. But researcher Joana Mello de Carvalho e Silva, professor of the History of Architecture at the Escola da Cidade, discovered that his trajectory would be ideal for studying the process by which São Paulo became a metropolis in the past century, as well as the formation of the Brazilian field of architectonics – which began only in the 1940s – and the contribution of foreign architects to these two processes.

 

At a time when São Paulo sought to establish itself as the country’s primary industrial, services and financial hub, downtown São Paulo – a privileged area of wealth, business and power – was regarded as the center of technological progress and metropolitan modernity, and the image of the skyscraper symbolized  this process, explains the researcher.

 

“The vertical buildings idealized by Pilon and so many other architects would define the notion of what a modern city is from the 1930s to the 1960s. That’s why the idea [of the research] was to link urbanization, architecture and the type of buildings constructed and how these factors provided and created images for the city,” affirms Mello, who is releasing O arquiteto e a produção da cidade: Jacques Pilon 1930-1960 (The architect and the production of the city: Jacques Pilon 1930-1960) through publishing house Annablume with FAPESP funding. The book is an expansion on Mello’s doctoral thesis, which describes work conducted at Universidade de São Paulo’s Architecture and Urbanism School (FAU-USP).

 

The doctorate formed part of a Thematic Project coordinated by Professor Ana Lúcia Duarte Lanna. The thematic project also involved other USP units, such as the Department of Architecture at Escola de Engenharia de São Carlos (now known as the Institute of Architecture and Urbanism), the Museu Paulista and the School of Philosophy, Languages and Human Sciences (FFLCH). Some of the results were published on the web. 

 

Panorama on foreigners

One of the pillars of the book is specifically the research on the role of foreign architects in building São Paulo. “Pilon’s trajectory has allowed me to study other foreign architects  because, among other things, he employed many of them in his office,” affirms the Mello.

 

Among the professionals who were heads of Pilon’s office in São Paulo were German-born Adolf Franz Heep (1902-1978) and Italy’s Gian Carlo Gasperini (1926). “In studying these architects who worked with Pilon, in addition to others who were his contemporaries, I was able to put together a panorama. I observed their strategies for entering São Paulo’s professional and social scenes, the difficulties they faced, what they built, their novel contribution to São Paulo’s architecture and the extent to which their knowledge was shared among national architects knowledge was shared among national architects.” 

 

According to Mello, in Pilon’s case, the knowledge he had was, to a certain degree, equal to that of São Paulo’s architects. “He did not bring any novelties,” said Mello in an interview with Agência FAPESP. “He put himself into a real estate market that was already structured, and his architectural language  was understood and met the expectations and desires of his clientele.”

 

One of the residential buildings that Pilon designed in his initial phase in São Paulo is the Santo André, on the corner of Avenida Angélica and Rua Piauí, directly in front of Praça Buenos Aires, in the heart of the upscale neighborhood Higienópolis. With rounded corners and boldly defined horizontal lines, the building was the second to be built in the neighborhood,  in the 1930s.

 

With roughly 1 million inhabitants, São Paulo was undergoing radical transformations at the time – principally in the old downtown area and the new center. These changes were taking place in neighborhoods such as Higienópolis, Santa Cecília and Campos Elíseos – with private investments, the construction of residential and commercial residential buildings and the opening of new roads and broadening of streets being promoted by then-Mayor Prestes Maia.

 

There was a major difference from the real estate market that we know today, particularly because many buildings were built by private investors who were involved in other economic activities. “Furthermore, the buildings built at that time were of higher quality, among other factors because people were not then accustomed to living in apartment buildings,  often associating them with tenements, so clientele had to be convinced that living in this new type of construction could be good,” commented Mello.

 

Diverse sources

Without the objective of writing a biography or a monograph, Mello took advantage of the biographical data from Pilon’s life to structure her thesis along three lines. In addition to the investigation of how foreign architects fit into São Paulo and the relationship between the construction of the city and its architecture, Mello presents a discussion on the formation of the architectonic field in Brazil based on the sociological concepts of French-national Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002).

 

The book is also structured along these three lines, following a particular chronological order. In the first part, which covers the period from 1910 to 1930, Mello discusses Pilon’s family relations, his education (and that of architects in general) and the reasons for his travel to Brazil.

 

In the other two chapters, which cover the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, Mello investigates the varied forms of documentary sources and presents an understanding of urban business of the time, the real estate market, Pilon’s offices, his projects and his clients.

 

Sensitive to adapting to the tastes of the clientele, the architectural house’s production underwent many transformations over the years. “From the moment the office grew, it concentrated on the administrative area but still focused on the architectural quality of his [Pilon’s] works. For this reason, he chose very good architects to be the heads of his office,” affirms the researchers.

 

Among those interviewed by Mello are Pilon’s son Gasperini, who still lives and works in São Paulo, and Brazilian architect Jerônimo Bonilha Esteves (1933), the last head of Pilon’s office. In addition to interviews, Mello investigates the structural, hydraulic and electrical aspects of complementary architectural projects, as well as the construction jobs, contracts, and professional and civil legislation at the time, among other documentary sources.

 

“I wanted to get close to the history of the ideas, the culture and the particular sociology of the culture,” affirmed Mello, describing her work. “I tried to mix several types of knowledge in an effort to create a dialogue with other fields and as a means of bringing architectonic debate out of isolation.”