Robert Sakula is a founder partner of Ash Sakula Architects, whose work includes the UK Centre for Carnival Arts in Luton, Tibby’s Triangle housing in Southwold and, currently, eco-houses in Hampshire.

I’ve always liked megacities. I lived for a year in Mexico City in the eighties, a few months in Cairo in the nineties, and a week in Chongqing in the noughties. So I had high expectations of São Paulo, Latin America’s largest city by far, and one of the biggest in the world, with 29 million in its metropolitan area. It’s also in the top ten of the most expensive cities in the world: a side dish of French fries in a greasy spoon costs a fiver, but luckily there are better things on offer: roasted palm heart, smoked catfish, strong Brazilian coffee.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, here in the 1930s, saw São Paulo still as an ordinary town, about which you could make coherent generalisations. São Paulo, he said, was a city ‘feverishly in the grip of a chronic disease: perpetually young, yet never healthy,’ and whose districts ‘pass from freshness to decay without ever being simply old.’ This still stands, yet now it is so big, so complex, so multifarious, so much a city of oppositions – ugly/beautiful, rich/poor, crazy/sane, experimental-yet-deeply-conservative – that almost anything you can grandly deduce about it is likely to be both utterly true and demonstrably false.

Unlike Rio, where the near vertical topography tips the favelas up into your line of sight in every part of the city, the relative flatness of São Paulo, its size, and the location of most favelas on its outskirts mean that their picturesque (and to São Paulo’s middle classes, increasingly desirable) qualities are mostly invisible. What you see instead is a city of acutely differentiated districts which have grown radially and sequentially from its original core, swallowing up pre-existing settlements along the way and transforming them into satellite centres. Each district has its own grid, coherent in itself but often unconnected with the greater whole. The interaction of the strictly Cartesian grid with the city’s often extreme topography has serendipitous effects, so an ordinary road suddenly topples over the edge of an escarpment or rises up at one-in-four. This is most extreme on either side of the city’s main boulevard, the Avenida Paulista, which runs along the ridgeline between São Paulo’s two main river basins. Lined with big, shiny, unremarkable office buildings, it seems the model of twenty-first century mainstream urban propriety, but turn left or right onto its cross streets and you hurtle downwards roller coaster style.

Talking to the locals, one gathers that doing architecture here is hard graft, with procurement following American models of conformity, economy and appropriateness: no surprises, please. And yet some have managed to break through. Oscar Niemeyer, of course, unpacked his bizarrely workable mix of fantasy and reality in Edifício Copan, an enormous yet elegant apartment building, and in a crazy and highly popular linear folly at Ibirapuera Park. João Artigas’ Faculty of Architecture, all in concrete with wonderfully generous ramps and a leaky roof, has an enviable interpenetration of inside and out which you suspect is impractical even in this benign climate, and yet deeply to be desired.

Meanwhile the great heroine, Lina Bo Bardi, has a magnificent and moving trio of works here: her own Glass House on a jungly hillside; the MASP art museum with a fabulous collection of almost everyone who matters, from Mantegna to Cezanne; and best of all, SESC Pompeia, a startlingly good community cultural centre where people fight for pebbled concrete to be restored, eighty-year-olds dance with abandon, and everyone looks beautiful bathed in a flattering light – a place to hang out without feeling lost. It is a refurbished factory, with a new insertion on the grandest scale imaginable in the form of two mega-tower gymnasia of in-situ concrete linked by fantastically unlikely diagonal aerial bridges. If it has any sense, São Paulo will make Bo Bardi its Gaudí, or its Mackintosh, because her work, where ethos and architecture unite, is the very best thing in this surprising city.

And the most surprising thing of all is something no one told me about São Paulo. Sitting on a rooftop one sunset looking north to the ridge of Avenida Paulista, the entire horizon was a bristling citadel of hundreds or perhaps thousands of mini-skyscrapers, so closely spaced that there was not an inch of sky between them, some topped with Eiffel Tower-like telecommunication masts, and the whole scene foregrounded by the deep green jungle moat of the gardens of Jardim. São Paulo, at least then, and from there, was a place of overwhelming beauty.

First published in AT235, February 2013