São Paulo
— a city that doesn't end, only changes neighbourhood.
Not only on a wall.
“Brazil's largest city, set on a plateau seven hundred and sixty metres above the Atlantic. Twelve million people in the municipality, twenty-two across the metropolitan region. The MASP floats over Avenida Paulista on red beams. Ibirapuera Park keeps the lung. The Mercadão pyramids fruit you have never seen; the Japanese quarter pours green tea; the Italian quarter argues over the cantina until late.
São Paulo, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
São Paulo, the capital of São Paulo state, sits on the Piratininga plateau at roughly 760 metres, about seventy kilometres inland from the Atlantic. The municipality holds around 12 million people; the metropolitan region passes 22 million, the largest urban area in the Southern Hemisphere. Founded by Jesuit priests in 1554 around the College of São Paulo, the city grew through the nineteenth-century coffee boom and the immigration waves that followed: Italian, Japanese, Lebanese, German, Portuguese. It is now Brazil's financial centre and home to the largest Japanese diaspora outside Japan.
The São Paulo Museum of Art, MASP, opened on Avenida Paulista in 1968: Lina Bo Bardi's red concrete box held seventy-four metres above the ground by four side beams, leaving the square below open. Beneath it lies one of the most important collections of European art in the Southern Hemisphere. A few blocks east, Oscar Niemeyer's Edifício Copan curves through 38 storeys of white concrete. The Pinacoteca, housed in a nineteenth-century brick shell renovated by Paulo Mendes da Rocha in 1998, holds the Brazilian collection.
Avenida Paulista runs 2.8 kilometres along the ridge of the city and closes to cars every Sunday, when an estimated 400,000 people walk, cycle, busk, and eat along its length. MASP, the Casa das Rosas at the southern end, and the Itaú Cultural along the avenue stay open. The Mercado Municipal in the Centro Histórico opens at six in the morning and closes by five, known for the mortadella sandwich and the pastel de bacalhau. Ibirapuera Park, designed by Niemeyer and Roberto Burle Marx, anchors the south.