Signature · Architecture · São Paulo
Jorge Zalszupin
Born in Warsaw, trained in Bucharest and chose São Paulo. He designed the buildings and, unable to find the furniture he wanted inside them, founded the factory that made it.
Who he is
Jorge Zalszupin (Warsaw, 1 June 1922 — São Paulo, 17 August 2020) fled the persecution of Jews in Poland and completed his architecture degree at the Faculty of Architecture in Bucharest, Romania, between 1941 and 1947. He emigrated to Brazil in 1949, drawn by the modernism of Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa, and settled in São Paulo, where he built his entire career and died at 98. Throughout it, he worked alongside names such as David Libeskind, Lucjan Korngold, Jorge Wilheim and Eduardo Corona.
His dual calling is what sets him apart. In 1959 he founded L’Atelier, a pioneer in the serial production of modern furniture in Brazil — until then, authorial furniture in the country was a one-off piece. The Dinamarquesa chair, from the same year, appeared in the house’s first collection and became one of the icons of Brazilian design; his pieces were chosen by Oscar Niemeyer for the Palácio da Alvorada and the Palácio do Planalto. Furniture design was not a hobby alongside architecture: it was the same investigation at another scale, and it is what Zalszupin is best known for today, at home and abroad.
In architecture, his residential output in São Paulo is lean and precise. Helenita, from 1962, designed with Henrique Alexander in Higienópolis, is the piece where the vocabulary appears whole: a monolithic tower on hexagonal marble-clad pilotis, slender metal beams alternating with ribbon windows, a suspended marquee and a walkway over a reflecting pool leading to a lobby designed as a glass box — the International Style of Mies van der Rohe translated for sixteen families, one per floor. It is one of the few residential works of his that remain in circulation in the highest-end market.
Language
- Style: International Style in a Brazilian key — the glass box and the exposed structure of the Miesian repertoire, resolved with the rigour of someone who also designed the chair that would sit inside it.
- Materials and signature: marble at the supports, slender metal beams and ribbon windows on the façade, a reflecting pool and suspended marquee at the entrance; and colour — the deep navy blue of Helenita is his signature, the gesture that lifts the building out of grey neutrality. In furniture, jacaranda wood, leather and pieces produced in series without losing an authorial design.
- Recognition: his work and life are the subject of books and exhibitions in Brazil and Poland, among them Jorge Zalszupin: Design Moderno no Brasil, by Maria Cecília Loschiavo dos Santos, and the architect’s own memoir, “De * pra lua”.
Landmark works
- Edifício Helenita (1962), with Henrique Alexander, in Higienópolis.
- Edifício Torre Paulista, São Paulo.
- Edifício Top Center, São Paulo.
- Edifício Wilson Mendes Caldeira, São Paulo.
- Residência Sacha Feher and Residência Henrique Flatauer, São Paulo.
- Interiors of the Mercedes-Benz factory.
- L’Atelier and the furniture of the Palácio da Alvorada and the Palácio do Planalto, at the invitation of Oscar Niemeyer.
