The Bandeira Building is located near an important mobility axis in São Paulo, connected to the subway station and bus terminal Vila Madalena. This condition defined a densification region for both residential and commercial uses and services, according to the new Master Plan. The Bandeira Building is, therefore, an example of a new urban morphology made possible by the new norms, which in addition to densification, promotes the widening of sidewalks, more trees on the public sidewalk, mixed use, and more active facades even in exclusively residential buildings.
These premises may bring important changes to the city scale and even to other municipalities, which have historically taken São Paulo’s main urbanistic laws as a reference. The Bandeira Building is, therefore, an exercise, done with great care, about better standards for vertical dwellings, in the context of a city that, in the last 50 years, has been shaped by the 1972 zoning law, which promoted verticalization without densification in several regions, as well as the predominance of exclusively residential buildings, with the painful separation of uses in the city, besides the growing movement of violent boundaries between public and private space.
The Bandeira project sought to insert the building in a delicate way in the city, despite its high density, with the design of two articulated volumes and open gardens that enlarge the public promenade. An alignment of cobogós (designed especially for this project) accompanies the entire front of the lot and creates a fold designing a small wooded plaza directly facing the sidewalk. This space is directly connected to the new vegetated and wooded areas of the sidewalk, designed together with the landscape architecture firm Soma Arquitetos. The visual permeability of the cobogó forms a “lacy” façade and integrates the sidewalk garden with the internal gardens of the building, providing a very gentle relationship with the public sidewalk.