São Paulo: the difference between city and metropolis

I may describe Sao Paolo with the eyes of a traveller, because it is impossible for a foreigner to acquire, in a short while, the privilege of discovering this urban conglomerate with the awareness and depth of its inhabitants and of the many scholars who have worked and lived there; in any case, it is difficult to yield to a kind of oblivion to express, unconsciously or consciously, a judgment that is uninfluenced by one’s specific expertise as architect, by a professional vision that attracts and rejects the values and conditions of a place where the key word seems to be “oxymoron”.  In fact, Sao Paolo is a kaleidoscope of contrasting images and conditions, it is vertical yet horizontal, dense yet rarefied, it abounds in green areas yet it is built so densely that it may even feel oppressive; it is poor bordering on indigence and at the same time rich and exclusive; it is barren yet luxuriant, old in its modernity, and nevertheless original, and therefore new, in its way to interpret a tradition that is perceptible also through the variety of ceramic “azulejos” that cover the filler panels of that infinite sequence of concrete frames that surface, like ribs, from the skin of the countless tall buildings for which the term skyscraper seems inappropriate. Impossible to get through, congested by cars, yet lacking an efficient subway network, everything is concentrated on the surface: an incredible concentration of life, density, volumes and constructions, stacked one along the other. From the terrace of the Italy building, one of the tallest in Sao Paolo, the buildings outline a horizon that appears in continuous expansion, while one often comes across empty, unexplainably abandoned buildings in the downtown area (more than 200 in the central district). This accumulation of layers and superimpositions represents the true identity of the “city”, or rather, the many cities that alternate and follow one another uninterruptedly, where the old town, which is not the centre of urban life, is recent (Avenida Paulista) whereas the ancient one (Praça da Sé) is peripheral, marginalized, degraded by social and living conditions that gradually evolve into the picturesque and nearby toponym “cracolandia” (city of drugs), subject of a slum clearance plan which among others involve a project by Herzog & de Meuron for the Nova Luz. This programme, as well as the purchase and renovation, on the part of the department of the “Secretaria Municipal da Habitação Prefeitura de São Paulo”, (see the interview with Elisabete França, pages 32-39) of many old empty buildings, opens the door to new opportunities associated with a possible urban regeneration, which has never been realized until today. In fact, Sao Paolo appears condemned to an eternal modernity well described by the wonderful examples of Oscar Niemeyer, a place where one celebrates the new and for many years one has forgotten the existing situation, the oldness that has never succeeded to become ancient, memory, tradition, at least symbolically, until the the turnaround made by Paulo Mendes da Rocha with the restoration of the Liceu de Artes and Oficios transformed into the new state art gallery.
The road system is often organized in levels, with crossing bridges and underpasses that make it hard to appreciate the actual level of a ground that is seldom horizontal and thus “adapted” to the foundation of a city; the river, even if cleaned, does not appear as a normal watercourse and its banks, flanked by rapid thoroughfares, seem like infrastructures for the processing of urban waste rather than a natural element wedged into a metropolitan environment. While the buildings are so manifold and variegated that they constitute, to an architectural scholar, the world’s highest concentrate of compositive variables, common traits and stylistic solutions that decline modernism in an infinite sequence of non-consolidated images surface, surprisingly, from this scenario.