Signature · Builder · São Paulo
Hindi
The house that verticalised Paraíso with BNH money — coloured tile on the façade, wide floor plan inside — and which, once in its entire output, delivered a full floor to a single family. Out of spite.
Who it is
Hindi Cia. Brasileira de Habitações was the construction and development company of architect and businessman Anuar Hindi, active in São Paulo between 1967 and 1983. It is one of the best-documented companies of its period — not through the press, but through academia: the company’s output became the subject of a master’s thesis at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie, defended in 2009 by Eliana Rosa de Queiroz Barbosa under the supervision of Nadia Somekh, who empirically surveyed the house’s developments and interviewed clients, suppliers and the developer himself.
What this research shows is what defines Hindi: it was the apartment factory of São Paulo’s middle market at the height of the Banco Nacional da Habitação. The works were financed by institutions of the Sistema Financeiro da Habitação, and the company produced at an industrial pace, with standardised designs and a façade so recognisable it became a signature — coloured tile and sliding shutters, in a play of shapes and colours with strong visual appeal. In the second half of the 1970s, this repertoire gave way to a more ornamented language and painted rendering, as the house moved towards the high end.
Product vision
- Positioning: middle-market vertical housing produced at scale with BNH resources, concentrated in Paraíso — where Hindi’s buildings remain to this day a benchmark of construction quality — and also present in Higienópolis and the streets near Parque Ibirapuera.
- Differentiators: wide floor plans, good natural light, ground-floor green areas and solid construction — the set of qualities that made the house’s buildings sought after fifty years later, generally by buyers who acquire them for renovation. The four-bedroom typology only entered the catalogue in the second half of the 1970s, and marks the company’s turn towards the luxury segment.
Works
- Palma di Montechiaro, in Higienópolis — Rua Rio de Janeiro, 33: one apartment per floor, 473 to 500 m², four suites and four parking spaces per family. Built in 1974. It is the only full-floor development in the entire surveyed sample of the company’s output, and it was born of a falling-out: offended by a group of twenty friends who had passed over his construction firm, saying it “wasn’t for luxury buildings”, Anuar Hindi bought a plot in Higienópolis, built something there more expensive than theirs and invited the twenty to the opening cocktail party — while their group’s building was still under construction.
- Outside the scope of the collection, the house’s output is documented at addresses in Paraíso and Rua Caconde, among others, and forms part of the FAU-USP architecture archive.
