Reliving my childhood....Sao Paulo Style

I was a kid with an architect for a dad. No complaints, that just meant we got to travel a lot with one consistent caveat, it was always in search of some building. I remember arguing over an 8 hour drive on our way to some random house in the middle of nowhere that dad planned as a, "family outing." The moment I was old enough to compile a decent strategy to avoid such adventures, my mom finally chimed as well, as if she had needed reinforcements all those years and the architect lost his battle. But only briefly as I came to find it was hard to discover a new city without knowing its architectural bones.

The past few weeks my parents have been visting and guess what we spent our time doing?

Exhibit A.

And so somewhere in between all the trips to various pieces of architecture, I realized that I actually enjoyed it and probably took for granted all those years as a juvenile student of the modern american landscape. I feel like I could lead a tour now on all the prolific design spots in this city as my dad made a detailed map of everything we saw! I had a planned to check out a few before their visit and while at the the Building Museum (Museu de Casa Brasileira) on Faria Lima a few months ago, I met an architect couple setting up a wonderful exhibit on wood in architecture. Turned out they spent 2 years in Chicago living three streets from where my husband grew up. We've stayed in touch and they offered to have my family over to their beautiful home one evening.  Thanks to their gracious hospitality we filled in the missing pieces we hadn't yet found, and forged a global building friendship!

- SESC Pompeia

- Oscar Niemeyer's Latin American Memorial Campus

- MUBE (Museum of Brazilian Sculpture)

- MASP (Museum of Art Sao Paulo)

- Parque Burle Marx

- Niemeyer in Parque Ibirapuera

- Paulo Mendes da Rocha's addition to the Pinacoteca (he is a Pritzker Prize winner)

- Architecture School at University of Sao Paulo

- Centro Cultural (+sweet green roof)

- Home of our dear friends, Marta and Marcelo

And there are plenty more places. I didn't take my nice camera around the city as we criss crossed around but I managed to document those with a point and shoot and my phone.  It was a great trip; I enjoyed Sao Paulo's extensive collection of interesting buildings and I feel like I really know the city now (from a concrete perspective!) and....in the end good ole dad won.