Signature · Architecture · São Paulo
Anuar Hindi
The architect and businessman who made Paraíso vertical — and who, offended by a group of friends, raised in Higienópolis the only full-floor building his company ever built.
Who he is
Anuar Hindi is an architect and businessman, founder of Hindi Cia. Brasileira de Habitações, a builder and developer active in São Paulo between 1967 and 1983. Under his direction, the company became the great apartment factory of the São Paulo mid-market at the height of the Banco Nacional da Habitação, producing at an industrial pace with funds from the Sistema Financeiro da Habitação and a façade so recognisable it became a signature — coloured ceramic tile and sliding shutters.
The house’s output is one of the best-documented of the period: it became the subject of a master’s thesis at the Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo of Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie, defended in 2009, for which the developer himself was interviewed, alongside clients and suppliers. Hindi’s buildings, concentrated in Paraíso and also present in Higienópolis and around Parque Ibirapuera, remain sought after fifty years later for their spacious floor plans, natural light and structural solidity.
In the second half of the 1970s the house moved towards the high end. It is from this moment that the most-told episode of his career dates: passed over by a group of twenty friends who had bought a plot of land on Alameda Franca and refused to hire Hindi on the grounds that it “wasn’t a luxury-building firm”, Anuar Hindi bought a plot on Rua Rio de Janeiro, in Higienópolis, built there a more luxurious building than theirs — Palma di Montechiaro, from 1974, with one apartment per floor — and invited the twenty to the opening cocktail party, while the group’s own building was still unfinished. The episode is recorded in the academic survey that studied the company’s output between 1967 and 1977.
Language
- Style: vertical housing produced at scale, with standardised designs and a strong plastic appeal in the façade; at the turn toward the high end, a more ornamented language and painted render in place of ceramic tile.
- Materials and signature: coloured ceramic tile and sliding shutters, spacious floor plans, good natural light, ground-floor green areas. The four-bedroom typology only enters the catalogue in the second half of the 1970s — it is the marker of the turn towards luxury.
Works
- Palma di Montechiaro, in Higienópolis — Rua Rio de Janeiro, 33; one apartment per floor, 473 to 500 m², four suites and four parking spaces per family; built in 1974. It is the only full-floor development in the entire surveyed sample of the company’s output.
- Outside the scope of this collection, Hindi’s output is documented at addresses in Paraíso and on Rua Caconde, among others, and is part of the architecture collection of FAU-USP.
Signatures in the portfolio
No development in the collection carries this signature yet — it is here for the weight of the name in São Paulo's high end.
