Jacques Pilon

Who he is

Jacques Émile Paul Pilon (Le Havre, France, 20 February 1905 — São Paulo, 11 July 1962) arrived in Brazil at age five, when his father was hired to organise and run the port of Rio de Janeiro. He returned to France to study and graduated in literature, law and architecture, the latter at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, in Paris, in 1932. Back in Rio in 1933, he worked at the office of Roberto R. Prentice; assigned to oversee construction of the Sul América Capitalização building, he moved to São Paulo in 1934 and never left.

Still in 1934 he partnered with civil engineer Francisco Matarazzo Neto, son of Count Andrea Matarazzo, in PILMAT — a design and construction firm that introduced the Franki pile to Brazil in 1935 and built, in the city centre, the Biblioteca Mário de Andrade, designed in 1936 and inaugurated in 1942. When PILMAT closed at the end of the decade, Pilon opened his own firm, through which passed as partners and collaborators the Germans Herbert Duschenes and Franz Heep (1902–1978), the Italian Gian Carlo Gasperini and the Brazilian Jerônimo Bonilha Esteves. Between his arrival and his death, he was involved in around sixty projects in the central area, of which at least fifty vertical buildings remain standing and in use.

His body of work is not of a single language, and that is precisely what makes it interesting. From the pragmatic grid of the PILMAT years, he moved, in the early 1940s, to a modernised classical composition — a façade divided into base, shaft and crown, continuous vertical columns, robust masonry balustrades replacing the metal tubes, cornices and mouldings — that catered to a clientele of traditional families and institutions, for whom the building had to express solidity. With the arrival of Franz Heep at the firm, in 1947, the rationalist repertoire came back to dominate. One of the most visible chapters of that traditionalist phase is in Higienópolisi: the mansion he designed in the 1940s in the image of the Petit Trianon, Marie Antoinette’s country house in the gardens of Versailles, today a protected heritage building at both municipal and state level and used as the social lobby of the Maria Antonietai building. The firm did not continue after Pilon’s death, in 1962.

Language

• Style: a conscious back-and-forth between classical-composition traditionalism and modern rationalism — not a straight-line evolution, but comings and goings within the same firm, depending on the client and the brief.
• Materials and signature: a tripartite division of the façade into base, shaft and crown; vertically proportioned window frames and continuous columns echoing the classical intercolumniation; masonry balustrades, cornices and grooves on the piers; on corner buildings, the cylindrical corner framed by a cornice, which gives the volume an almost baroque drama. On the technical side, the Franki pile, which he brought to the country.
• Recognition: work included in the exhibition Brazil Builds: architecture new and old (MoMA, New York, 1943) and in Warchavchik, Pilon, Rino Levi — Três Momentos da Arquitetura Paulista (Museu Lasar Segall/Funarte, 1983).

Landmark works

• Biblioteca Mário de Andrade, in downtown São Paulo — designed in 1936, inaugurated in 1942.
• A 1940s mansion on Avenida Higienópolis, in the image of Versailles’s Petit Trianon: a protected heritage building and today the social lobby of the Maria Antonietai.
• Edifício Ernesto Ramos and Edifício Canadá, downtown.
• Edifício Santa Margarida and Edifício Irradiação, corner buildings of the traditionalist phase.
• Edifício Guilherme Guinle, the former headquarters of Diários Associados.
• Edifício Edlu.
• The former headquarters of the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo.
• Edifícios Paulicéia and São Carlos do Pinhal.