Signature · Developer · São Paulo
Albuquerque Takaoka
The company that invented Alphaville — and, with it, the planned-neighbourhood model the whole of Brazil later copied.
Who it is
Albuquerque & Takaoka was founded in 1951 by two young civil engineers who had graduated together from the Escola Politécnica da USP in 1949: Renato de Albuquerque and Yojiro Takaoka (1923–1994). It began small, with houses and small public and commercial buildings — including a church. With the cycle of public works in São Paulo, it moved into heavy construction: bridges and viaducts, canals, large public buildings and low-income housing complexes.
In the 1970s the company diversified into vertical residential development in São Paulo and created, in 1973, the concept of the gated vertical condominium with Ilhas do Sul. That same year the partners bought five hundred hectares of the former Fazenda Tamboré, in Barueri. The original plan was a residential subdivision, vetoed by the local mayor; the response was to create Brazil’s first industrial and business park for non-polluting industries, with infrastructure already in place and clear land-use rules. Hewlett-Packard was the first to commit, in 1975. The need for housing for those companies’ executives opened the first AlphaVille Residencial — and the realisation that residential sales yielded more than business sales led the subdivisions to be opened one by one, numbered in sequence.
The same company also produced Aldeia da Serra, next to Alphaville, and the beach condominium Toque-Toque Pequeno, on the north coast of São Paulo state. The partnership lasted until the death of Yojiro Takaoka, in 1994. The following year the company was split: Alphaville Urbanismo went to Renato de Albuquerque and Y. Takaoka to Yojiro’s children.
In this collection, the company’s lineage is found in Alphaville Residencial 1, the founding residential development, in Barueri, and in Alphaville Residencial 10, in Santana de Parnaíba.
Product vision
- Positioning: large-scale private urbanism — an entire planned neighbourhood, with infrastructure, land-use rules and resident governance, rather than a standalone development.
- Differentiators: the combination of an economic base and a residential base in the same plan (the business centre came before the houses), infrastructure put in place before the sale, and a homeowners’ association model that manages each residential development — a formula later replicated across the whole industry.
Developments
- Alphaville, in Barueri and Santana de Parnaíba — the business centre from 1973 and the residential developments from 1975, starting with Alphaville Residencial 1.
- Aldeia da Serra, in the Alphaville area.
- Ilhas do Sul, São Paulo — 1973, the city’s first gated vertical condominium.
- Toque-Toque Pequeno, on the north coast of São Paulo state.
