Artist Lucas Arruda: ‘I take the rainforest atmosphere and bring it to São Paulo’

In the hip São Paulo district of Pinheiros, there was one specific street that artist Lucas Arruda had in mind for his home. So much so that he would walk through this quiet and leafy corner of the Brazilian city every day, keeping an eye out for “for sale” signs. When he was away, he asked his studio assistant, Juliana, to keep up the vigil. “Then one day when I was in Paris she called to tell me about a house,” he recalls. “I came straight back to Brazil and just fell in love with it.” 

Arruda describes the 1950s building as “a Modernist house, not designed by an important architect, but someone, for sure, who had a good vision”. For the 41-year-old artist, who has just opened a show at Paris’s Musée d’Orsay, São Paulo’s mid-century architecture is a passion. He highlights designs by architects from the Escola Paulista de Arquitetura (São Paulo School), such as Vilanova Artigas and Paulo Mendes da Rocha, in the neighbourhood of Higienópolis; the 1950 cantilevered Glass House of Lina Bo Bardi is a favourite.

But everyday properties from this era, he says, “are becoming more and more rare. Little by little, they are disappearing, so it...
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