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Banco Safra

1983, São Paulo
Landscape architecture: Roberto Burle Marx
Associates: Haruyoshi Ono, Luiz Cancio
Architecture: Maurício Kogan, Carlos Villar

Burle Marx and his firm designed many corporate headquarters in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The head office of Banco Safra on Avenida Paulista, one of São Paulo’s arteries, is one example. Like the design for the Ministry of Education and Health forty years earlier, there is a rooftop garden on a lower part of the building, which can thus be viewed from above. The multicoloured paving stones used for the garden echo the building’s red granite facade and dark-tinted windows. The planting is restricted to planter pots. The greens of the plants and the multicoloured flowers add pops of colour and visual interest to the design of the pavement, which is dominated by warm tones.

Burle Marx also designed a concrete relief and a granite floor for the lobby of the building. He had been making concrete murals since the 1950s. The monumental concrete relief for the head office of Banco Safra is a high point in Burle Marx’s work in this medium. Though influenced by the concrete art movement, he cultivated his own approach, inspired by nature and incorporating organic forms. The relief’s organic forms are complemented by the multicoloured granite floor that follows a strictly geometrical pattern.