First there's the city of the future, a city of bold and new ideas and infinite confidence in progress. The architecture of this city responds to the present as if it was seen from the future.The most recent future I've seen so far in Sao Paulo is Rino Levi's FIESP-CIESP-SESI building on Paulista Avenue, a radical brutalist reinterpretation of the skyscraper. It dates from 1979.
The second city is the city of the present. This is the city of favelas and other illegal settlements. They are extremely flexible. Migration is high, investments are low. This city is in a permanent state of now. It doesn't plan a future, it doesn't look at the past. It simply responds to changing conditions in a bedazzling pace. Months, not years. As Cantinho do Ceu's lake shores get cleared from any development, business will first decrease as a response to having fewer customers. No sooner than the planned park along the shores is in place will business anticipate to the commercial opportunities linked to it.
The third is the city of the past. It's the city of paranoia, of people locking themselves up behind fences and reflecting in their architecture eras of which they believe things were better. 19th Century Parisian architecture is stretched to a hundred meter tall and Greek temples are scaled up to giant shopping boxes to forcefully fit the current context of the metropolis.
