Cidade Matarazzo, or Matarazzo City, is a complex of low-rise Italianate buildings surrounded by glass-and-steel skyscrapers in the heart of São Paulo. For 50 years, it housed the city’s main maternity hospital, ushering 550,000 Paulistas into the world. But in 1993, the hospital shut down and the buildings were abandoned. A quick walk from the Avenida Paulista, the city’s major boulevard, and the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), the country’s pre-eminent art museum, the derelict 7.5-acre site was a tantalizing anomaly in a rapidly growing metropolis of 23 million with a voracious hunger for buildable land.
Enter Alexandre Allard. A French entrepreneur who once owned Balmain, Allard acquired the property in 2011, undaunted by the preservation restrictions that were unusual for São Paulo. His vision was to create a hub that drew locals and visitors to a site that was originally developed by another Brazilian immigrant, Francesco Matarazzo, an Italian count who arrived in Brazil in 1881 and became one of the country’s most important businessmen and philanthropists, founding a dynasty that lasted a century before crumbling in bankruptcy.
Arguably, the most striking art is by the celebrated Vik Muniz, a native of São Paulo who divides his time between Rio de Janeiro and Brooklyn. He designed a stunning rose window for a restored chapel, open to the public, that was created in 1922 in honor of Santa Luzia, patron of sight, after Count Matarazzo’s nephew was cured of vision problems. Muniz incorporated catalog and magazine images of everything from rhinoceroses to bicycles into his stained-glass portrait of the saint, who has a big blue eye on the palm of each hand.
Off the lobby is Muniz’s assemblage of framed postcard-size images and memorabilia (including medals and vaccine syringes) that commemorate the 20th century-spanning life history of the Conde Augusto Candido Maldoror de Lautréamont de Taraz, a fictional alter ego of the Count Matarazzo, who is cleverly named for the Uruguay-born French poet Isidore Ducasse, better known as the Comte de Lautréamont, a 19th-century forerunner of Surrealism and, like Taraz, an imaginary count.
Along with art, Cidade Matarazzo champions sustainability, and the renovation has relied on recycled materials for construction. With his wife, Patricia Ellen Allard, Alexandre Allard last year inaugurated AYA Earth Partners as a center for sustainable business development, to encourage Brazil’s progress to carbon neutrality. It is housed in a handsome LEED Platinum-certified building. The facade is adorned with concrete renditions of Jagube vines, the source of Ayahuasca tea. Living vines grow over them.
Not far away is a branch of Soho House—the first in South America—which, in addition to 32 bedrooms and a terrace restaurant, is decorated with works by more than 60 Brazilian artists. (The art went up before the gym, probably a misplaced priority in body-conscious Brazil. Responding to member feedback, a large state-of-the-art facility will open next year.) From a patio, you can catch a glimpse of Lina Bo Bardi’s modernist architecture of MASP.
In September, Casa Bradesco, a gallery designed, like AYA, by Marseille-based architect Rudy Ricciotti, opened its inaugural exhibition, “Inflamação” (“Inflammation”), by Anish Kapoor. Running until January 15, its headliner is a site-specific installation, Blinded by Eyes, Butchered by Birth, composed of large red inflatable forms that are pressed against steel columns supporting the recycled-wood ceiling. Although the other pieces in the show are fabricated from different materials, most of them are also red.
Red is a favorite color of Kapoor’s. Discussing “Inflamação,” he has said, “Red is the color of the earth… the color of blood and the body.” However, red is also the branding color of Banco Bradesco, the gallery’s sponsor, whose crimson signs are instantly recognizable throughout Brazil. When I asked if there was a connection, Marcello Dantas, the curator of the exhibition, pointed out Kapoor’s longstanding fondness for the color and maintained that its ubiquity in the show has “nothing to do with the bank at all.”
wonder. Big banks in Brazil operate cultural centers that are essential to the country’s artistic life. Clearly the banks believe that this patronage is good for business—maybe even that there is no banking without culture. But in this politically divisive moment, the linkage of art with luxury is awkward. Blinded by Eyes, Butchered by Birth, acquires additional layers of complexity if Kapoor is suggesting that Bradesco, his wealthy benefactor, may be implicated in the inflammation that is enraging the populace and burning the planet.
Generally speaking, the art on display at Cidade Matarazzo doesn’t provoke such discomfiting questions. Already attracting many Brazilians, the development will open 14 restaurants and a high-end shopping center next year. Having established a swanky place to stay, Allard has moved to dining and shopping. The erstwhile maternity hospital has given birth to a luxurious ecosystem, warmed and energized by art.
