Capital-architecture: the functionality of the \Paulista\ corporate buildings

Author(s)

Isadora de Andrade Guerreiro

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo (FAU/SBI)
• Defense date: 2010-09-28

Examining board members

Vera Maria Pallamin; Otilia Beatriz Fiori Arantes; Jorge Luis da Silva Grespan

• Advisor: Vera Maria Pallamin

Abstract

Sao Paulo witnessed, over the past two decades, the emergence of large commercial buildings that started to form a landscape that has become the city\'s image export. This phenomenon is not isolated: it is part of a movement of transformation in which economy and urban space are agents of the same social process, politically concatenated to the government, in several instances, and to international capital. Its origin lies in the openness of the countrys economy in the 1990s, which marked a significant increase of multinational companies on national soil, which have made a new demand for a different space the corporate towers. This movement gained new determinants from the 2000s, when several urban and economic instruments were created and enabled the corporate building, before understood as a fixed asset, to modify its image in the cycle of valorization and begin to act predominantly as a capital in the sphere of circulation. Added to this is the fact that the national real state market, since 2005, undergoes through changes in its organizational and performance form, due to the IPO of significant companies in the sector. These factors have formed a scenario in which this architecture is gaining new roles, especially regarding the representation of capital. In this aspect, the local determinants meet global determinants, in a relationship that must synthesize an alignment apparently unhindered. This study aims to examine this encounter, in the field of architecture, in order to understand, based on its specific local conditions, the contradictions that surround it. In this encounter, it will be taken into consideration the features of paulista (original from the state of Sao Paulo) architecture in this new economic scenario. The local chain of production, circulation and use of corporate buildings will appear, revealing the idiosyncrasies, changes and local difficulties that will define our relationship with the international capital market. (AU)