I keep taking photos of the buildings that I see even though I have been in brazil for about 2 months now. There are still buildings that catch my eye and make me want to take their picture.
Like this, Its cool how some people never sell their house even when the area gets super expensive and then developers build giant towers right up to the property line leaving a little relic like this behind.
The Patterns in the architecture are what i love so much. Visual patterns are everywhere to be seen in Brazil. Its this fusion of Nature and Modern Architecure.
I think it comes from:
Roberto Burle Marx: Pioneered modern landscape architecture using native Brazilian flora, abstract geometric forms, and a painterly approach that blurred boundaries between architecture and environment.
Affonso Reidy: Emphasized social housing, structural clarity, and integration with landscape—especially in collaborations with Burle Marx (e.g., the Pedregulho Housing Complex)—creating humane, functional modernism.
Roberto Burle Marx is now one of my favorite artists.
Even the favelas have their own kind of visual pattern that references the skyscrapers in a way, in how the rectangles climb the mountain like a living patchwork.
The idea of patchwork is what really speaks to me as an artist. I was bombarded with this every single time i looked at the ground when I was walking on the sidewalk. All of the sidewalks are Black and White portuguese bricks, some containing elaborate patterns.
I really found it fascinating that they used this tile-work pretty much everywhere in Rio. All of the bricks are placed by hand.
I heard that these bricks started as ceramic scraps, not actual bricks, because it was cheaper to use the scraps and i heard they used slaves to lay all these bricks down. I would like to research and learn more about ONLY the Portuguese bricks.
They fall apart sometimes, and need to be maintained. Holes develop in the sidewalk and are filled with sand, temporarily before a maintenance worker can come and replace the bricks with some kind of cement.
When a pipe needs to be installed, the bricks must be removed. I love everything about this. Instead of using cement, these brick patters are preferred and used everywhere.
One day when I was walking to the beach I saw a group of maintenance workers fixing up part of one of the walkways that crossed over the highway.
Some kind of morter is used. Its mixed with sand maybe, but its not normal hard cement. Water is added after the bricks are in place.
The labor intensive process that is involved here is so cool and artistic. If I lived in Rio I would want this to be my job. I would enjoy very much going around and repairing the brickwork. It looks super fun.
My air Bnb also had the coolest tiles on the floor of the first floor entryway.
Back to the buildings, Here is a funny juxtaposition of barbed wire and modern residential housing.
Patterns everywhere...
Lots of beige, white and gray colors in the buildings. There is also a radical Blue that is used in the windows. I think it has some kind of anti-UV radiation aspect to them because you see this in california too where its hot.
I think i'm going to do a separate architecture post on Sao Paulo because the buildings are all shorter but there are a lot more of them, and the street art is unique...
I liked how this one reflected a green aura onto the ground. I went and stood in the green light and it felt cool.
More notably interesting skyscraper buildings in downtown centro that I spotted on a peaceful sunday afternoon.
Its cool because when walking around on foot isn't enough of an architecture tour, you can take 10 minutes to drive up to the top of a mountain and see what they all look like together, from above.
