Edificio Copan

Edificio Copan rises in downtown Sao Paulo, designed by the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer with structural engineering by Joaquim Cardozo and completed in 1966 to mark the city's Fourth Centenary celebrations. Its signature feature is a continuously curving, sinuous facade that wraps the building's mass into a serpentine plan rather than a conventional rectilinear tower, making it one of the most visually distinctive silhouettes on the Sao Paulo skyline. At 42 stories and roughly 118 meters tall, the building holds some 1,160 apartments across 120,000 square meters of floor area divided among six interconnected blocks, and at the time of its completion it contained the largest reinforced concrete structure in Brazil. Copan has long housed residents from a notably broad range of social classes alongside ground-floor shops and commercial space, a mix that has made it as much a working cross-section of the city as an architectural landmark. It stands today as one of the defining symbols of modern Brazilian architecture and of Niemeyer's international reputation.