Signature · Architecture · São Paulo
Júlio Neves
Six decades of practice in São Paulo, and a body of work measured in city blocks: shopping centres, mixed-use complexes and the urban operations that redesigned the city's south-western quadrant.
Who he is
Júlio José Franco Neves (São Paulo, 1932) graduated from the Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo of Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie, between 1950 and 1955, in the generation that saw Brasília born. In April 1966 he founded the Escritório Técnico Júlio Neves — today Arquitetura Julio Neves —, a design, consulting and planning house that established itself as one of the country’s largest in large-scale works: shopping centres, corporate headquarters, hospitals, hotels, schools and urban planning.
His institutional life kept pace with his design work. He was president of IAB-SP in 1966–1967 and, later, of the national IAB and of AsBEA, the association of architecture firms. He was president of MASP for fourteen years: first elected in 1994, successively re-elected for two-year terms, he left the post in 2008. In 2010, under his influence, the museum’s expansion project on an adjoining plot was approved, involving the renovation of the Edifício Dumont-Adams.
The other side of his work is urban, and it was publicly contested. In 1986, hired by Jânio Quadros’s administration, he presented the Boulevard Zona Sul: a road that would connect Avenida Brigadeiro Faria Lima to Engenheiro Luís Carlos Berrini, with demolition and reurbanisation of entire blocks in Pinheiros, in Itaim Bibi and in Vila Olímpia. The project stalled under the Luiza Erundina administration and resurfaced in the following administration in the form of an urban operation — the Operação Urbana Faria Lima — adjusted to residents’ demands, which extended the avenue and created the corporate axis São Paulo has today. It was contested at the time by part of the population of the neighbourhoods involved; it is, in any case, one of the interventions that most changed the geography of São Paulo’s high end.
Language
- Style: large-scale commercial and corporate architecture, pragmatic and function-oriented, designed alongside the surrounding urban fabric rather than against it.
- Materials and signature: the mixed-use complex as the unit of design — shopping centre, office and residence stitched together within the same block, with internal circulation between the pieces. At Praça Villa Lobos, the gesture is the square: nine slender towers set apart from one another, so that none blocks another’s view, around thirteen thousand square metres of deliberate void.
- Recognition: presided over IAB-SP (1966–1967), the national IAB and AsBEA, and ran MASP for fourteen years.
Landmark works
- Complexo Villa-Lobos, in Alto de Pinheiros: the Shopping Villa-Lobos and the residential Praça Villa Lobos, connected by an internal passage.
- Shopping Iguatemi Campinas.
- Operação Urbana Faria Lima and the extension of Avenida Brigadeiro Faria Lima, stemming from the Boulevard Zona Sul project.
- MASP’s expansion project on an adjoining plot, with the renovation of the Edifício Dumont-Adams.
