Signature · Architecture · São Paulo
Henrique Cambiaghi
Forty-five years designing the São Paulo residential building from inside the industry — more than four hundred completed works and a permanent seat on the body that represents Brazilian architecture firms.
Who he is
Henrique Cambiaghi Filho was born in São Paulo in 1950, graduated as an architect and urban planner from FAU-USP in 1973 and completed his postgraduate studies at the same faculty in 1979. In 1981 he founded CFA Cambiaghi Arquitetura, of which he is managing partner.
It is an industry firm, not one of authorial manifestos: it works closely with developers, with long-standing partner engineers and consultants, and has accumulated more than 750 projects, 380 completed works and around 11 million square metres built, besides more than 2,000 technical feasibility studies. The portfolio adds up to more than 400 residential and corporate buildings.
Since 1992 Cambiaghi has held leadership positions at AsBEA — the Brazilian Association of Architecture Firms — which places him less as a signature on a façade and more as one of the voices that shaped the rules of the trade in Brazil.
In the collection, he signs Horacio Lafer Itaim, in Itaim Bibi.
Language
- Style: high-end market residential architecture, resolved from the feasibility of the site — the approach grows from what the lot and the law allow, and the floor plan governs the façade.
- Materials and signature: the firm’s mark is scale and repetition done well: wide-typology towers, few units per floor and a sober vocabulary that ages without dating.
- Awards: (not found). The firm’s recognition comes through another channel — institutional representation at AsBEA.
Landmark works
- Horacio Lafer Itaim, in Itaim Bibi — authorship recorded in the municipal approval permit (2006 vintage), delivered in 2008.
