Cisalpina

History

Cisalpina occupies number 1349 on Rua José Maria Lisboa, in the residential core of Jardim Paulistai, between the Jardinsi and Avenida Paulistai. The condominium has appeared in public records since 1992, but the building is far older than its own registration: the city’s property surveys place the construction in the early 1970s and disagree between 1972 and 1973 — which is why this entry does not fix a year. The authorship of the project is not publicly documented and, for that reason, is not attributed here.

• Concept: the wide floor plate of the 1970s in Jardim Paulistai — a standard size above four hundred metres, three parking spaces and no concession in the floor plan.
• Trivia: the stretch of Rua José Maria Lisboa where Cisalpina stands is so dense with named buildings that the Post Office gave separate addressing to a good number of them, one by one: Araçari, Esther, Cisne, Anhambé, Borborê, Mediterranée, Ilhas Gregas, Torre Branca. It is the signature of a street that verticalised early, and with a name.

Architecture and aesthetics

What defines Cisalpina is the floor plate. A single tower in the style that Jardim Paulistai raised in the early 1970s — a standard floor plan of 406 m² with three bedrooms, units reaching 750 m² and three parking spaces per flat: measurements that today belong to the exceptional bracket and that back then were the neighbourhood’s everyday standard. With no architecture firm documented in a public source, the project remains uncredited in this entry; the signature, in this case, is that of the generation of buildings to which it belongs.

Aesthetics and scarcity

Technical specifications

• Towers and units: a single tower.
• Sizes: 406 m² in the standard floor plan in circulation, with 3 bedrooms; the archive also records units reaching 750 m², with 3 to 4 en-suites.
• Parking spaces: 3.

Location and surroundings

Points of interest · distances in metres

Jardim Paulista: the address

Jardim Paulistai is the neighbourhood where São Paulo learned to live well and never unlearned it. Rua José Maria Lisboa runs through the residential core of the Jardinsi, crossing the grid of blocks that Alameda Francai and Rua Oscar Freirei have organised since the start of the twentieth century, and reaches Avenida Paulistai, the Conjunto Nacionali and Colégio Dante Alighierii within a few minutes. It is an address that does not depend on novelty: the road network, street-level shops and tree cover have been settled for decades, and recent verticalisation has found little land left to grow into.