Prudência

History

In 1944 the company Prudência e Capitalizaçãoi commissioned Rino Levii, with Roberto Cerqueira Césari and Luís Roberto Carvalho Francoi, to design an apartment building for a plot of almost four thousand square metres on Avenida Higienópolis. The building was finished in 1948, built by Barreto Xande & Ciai, and changed what São Paulo understood by living in a building. The Prudência brought hot-and-cold air conditioning controlled room by room, central hot water, its own generator and a ground-floor playground — items the city did not know in a residential building. An advertisement published in O Estado de S. Paulo in November 1951 described it as “the only building in Brazil with hot-and-cold air conditioning controlled in every room”, alongside the sixty-square-metre living room, the built-in wardrobes in perobinha do campo and pau-marfim wood, and the marble floors and staircases. Among the first co-owners were the Rodrigues Alves and Moreira Salles families.

• Concept: free plan in 1944 — inside the flat, only bathrooms, kitchen and the circulation columns had a fixed place; everything else was defined by movable partitions the resident could rearrange.
• Trivia: the idea was too radical for its time. According to statements by the architects themselves, Roberto Cerqueira Césari and Luís Roberto Carvalho Francoi, every buyer rejected the movable partitions, with a single exception — Mr. Severo Gomes; the rest built masonry walls over the modulation axes. Another detail: part of Roberto Burle Marxi‘s original landscaping was sacrificed in a later renovation of the ground floor, to open up more parking spaces. The tiles he painted in the hall remain.

Architecture and aesthetics

An orthogonal U-shaped volume, set with ample room on a 3,940 m² plot — the City Hall measures the building’s footprint at 1,562 m², a little over 40% of the plot. The four flats on each floor group in pairs around two vertical circulation cores, positioned at the internal angles of the U. The internal layout was modulated over the structural grid, and it is the clarity of that grid that frees the façade: the external reading is rationalist, of dry geometry and dark colours, while the interior is the opposite — flexible, redistributable, open. The measured height of the slab is 34.65 metres. The landscaping and the hall’s tile panel, in blue and yellow on a white background, are by Roberto Burle Marxi; the partnership between him and Rino Levii on this building is one of the most cited in Brazilian modern architecture.

Aesthetics and scarcity

Technical specifications

• Towers and units: 1 single U-shaped volume, 9 standard floors, 4 flats per floor distributed across two vertical circulation cores. 36 flats plus 2 penthouses on the top floor — 38 units. A basement garage completes twelve levels.
• Areas: 315 to 350 m² in the standard flats, with four bedrooms, one of them en suite, a living room of about sixty square metres and a clear separation between the social and service areas by a central corridor.
• Parking spaces: basement garage, expanded in a later renovation of the ground floor.
• Structural highlights: movable partitions over a modulated structural grid; central hot-and-cold air conditioning with room-by-room control; central hot water; own generator; six lifts; ground-floor playground, one of the first in the city in a residential building; gardens and tile panel by Roberto Burle Marxi.
• Registry and parameters: 3,940 m² plot · built area of 17,135 m² · building footprint 1,562 m² (≈40% occupancy rate) · measured height 34.65 m · 9 standard floors + 2 penthouses + 1 basement · 38 units · 4 per floor · 6 lifts · private areas from 315 m² to 350 m² · designed in 1944, delivered in 1948 · listed as heritage by CONPRESP, Resolution 09/94 · registry jurisdiction 5º Registro de Imóveis de São Pauloi · ZM zoning (Lei 16.402/2016).

Leisure and facilities

• Gardens by Roberto Burle Marxi at the entrance
• Tile panel by Roberto Burle Marxi in the hall
• Ground-floor playground
• Six lifts
• Own generator
• Central hot-and-cold air conditioning
• Central hot water
• Basement garage

Location and surroundings

Points of interest · distances in metres

Higienópolis: the address

Higienópolisi is the neighbourhood São Paulo built for itself before inventing Jardinsi — smallholdings that became mansions at the end of the nineteenth century, and mansions that became, from the 1940s onward, the city’s first collection of luxury buildings. The Prudência is the inaugural landmark of that turn, and it is not alone: Avenida Higienópolis concentrates a sequence of buildings from the same generation, and twenty-five of them were listed as heritage in the same process, in 1994. The result is a neighbourhood that practically never changes silhouette: leafy blocks, low-traffic streets, Shopping Pátio Higienópolisi and Parque Buenos Airesi within walking distance, Hospital Samaritanoi next door and Colégio Rio Branco on the same avenue. Whoever lives here lives in a neighbourhood the law protects from itself.