Sabiá

History

Sabiá occupies the corner plot between Rua Peixoto Gomide and Rua Barão de Capanema, a walk from Clube Paulistanoi and Rua Estados Unidos. It has two frontages and, because of that, two addresses: at the Post Office it is number 1995 on Peixoto Gomide, odd side, Jardim Paulistai; in market listings it also appears as 159 on Barão de Capanema, already in Cerqueira Césari. It is a building of the São Paulo modernist crop — structure independent of the masonry, pilotis freeing up the ground floor, ribbon windows — and the design is credited, in a single specialist source, to the architect João Kon, a name linked to more than two hundred apartment buildings in the city and to an entire lineage of buildings named after birds. The same source places the design in the 1960s and the completion of the work in 1972. Until a second source confirms it, this entry does not fix either the credit or the year of completion.

• Concept: privacy solved through siting, not through a wall — one unit per floor, the ground floor open on pilotis and the tower set back from the street to gain height and distance.
• Trivia: the building has two façades and treats each one differently. The one facing Peixoto Gomide is modular and set back, with continuous sills and metal frames rhythmed by slender vertical lines; the one on Barão de Capanema has no setback at all — it sits right on the pavement, catches the north-east sun and gains small exposed-concrete balconies over pebble-dash cladding in the “canjiquinha” pattern. And there is an absence that says a lot: the surveys that count Barão de Capanema building by building list seventeen buildings and do not include this one, because the main door’s number belongs to the other street.

Architecture and aesthetics

Modernist classic, sober in form and imposing in scale. The structure does not hide itself: the supporting columns run along the façade, sandblasted with an aggregate finish, and turn the construction system into the building’s main subject. On both faces, the masonry is infill, not structure — hence the continuous windows, with horizontal louvred panels that change the façade’s pattern according to the day and the hour. On the Peixoto Gomide side, a generous setback pulls the tower away from the street: it buys height, buys quiet for the apartments, and leads the entrance through the garden to a large, fully glazed hall, which forms the passage between the pavement and the home. On the Barão de Capanema side, the gesture is the opposite — the building sits close to the pavement, and the cantilevered balconies surprise precisely because they seem detached from the structure.

Aesthetics and scarcity

Technical specifications

• Towers and units: 1 tower, 1 apartment per floor.
• Sizes: 290 m² in the standard floor plan, with 3 bedrooms.
• Parking: 2.
• Structural highlights: corner siting with two treated façades; ground floor on pilotis; landscaped setback on the main frontage; glazed entrance hall; structure independent of the masonry, with exposed columns on the façade; exposed-concrete balconies and pebble-dash cladding on the north-east face.

Location and surroundings

Points of interest · distances in metres

Jardim Paulista: the address

Jardim Paulistai is the part of São Paulo that learnt to live well early on and never unlearnt it. Rua Peixoto Gomide crosses the residential heart of the Jardinsi from end to end and, on this stretch, is already on the quiet side: tree-lined blocks, street-level shops a few steps away and Clube Paulistanoi within walking distance. The corner with Barão de Capanema also delivers a geographical advantage — Barão is a dead-end street, with traffic almost exclusively from residents, and on Thursdays it hosts the street market starting right at this crossing. Rua Oscar Freirei and Estação Oscar Freirei lie on the other side, towards Alameda Casa Brancai, and the whole grid has been built up for decades: here there is no land left to develop.