SF Sorrow.

I love the architecture in São Paulo, it's one of my favourite things about living here. From leafy Jardins, where the rich indulge their fantasies of Cubist castles and Brutalist bunkers, to Avenida Paulista, where the government and commercial sectors have poured themselves into ever more daring and outlandish forms, it's always eclectic and often beautiful.

A bank on Avenida PaulistaAnother bank on Av. PaulistaThe FIESP building, Av. Paulista again (how many people saw the Jawa Sandcrawler?) But then there are those buildings that you find among the serried concrete forests of Moema and Pinheiros, in which the brilliant modernist future that everyone dreamt of got overtaken by history. Those are my personal favourites. Often they’re just condos or nondescript office blocks, but that’s part of their appeal: the fact that these utilitarian buildings were given the same daring geometric planes and ergonomic curves of poured concrete as the new museums and presidential residences.

A little modernist villa down a side-street.Another one just a few doors down.Now, of course, they’re all condemned to obsolescence, the faded outposts of a reality we didn’t follow, a future we disdained. Their daring façades are stained with tropical rain and their ergonomic curves are fissured with cracks. And yet I still get so happy whenever I stumble on one of them buried among the parade of mundane, everyday buildings, like it’s a ghost ship carrying news from another world.

A bizarre panopticon office-cum-car park Another flipping bank, with extraordinary windows and a guy sleeping rough beneathSomehow it always reminds me of the beginning of the first Star Wars movie. You know, when Luke goes for dinner with Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, and she’s stirring vegetables round in some wacky glass boiler contraption and they drink blue milk out of plastic  – PLASTIC! – cups. Everyone knew back then that this was how the future would look (Tupperware was the drinking vessel of a bright new tomorrow) – and I reckon that part of us still mourns for that lost future.

Perhaps that's why I like these buildings so much. They give you the feeling that you’re living in some fictive dystopia, walking those mean, unlovely streets among which still protrude the crumbling remains of a lost, utopian world. As a concept, it’s pure sci-fi. 

A building on Rua Joaquin Antunes – check out the ergonomic curves...mmm, future-tasticAnother one on Joaquin, just a few doors down