By Rodrigo Uchoa, special for Brazil Stock Guide
On any given Sunday, when Avenida Paulista closes to cars and opens to people, it is hard to imagine that this river of cyclists, street musicians and families with dogs was once the most solemn place in Brazil. Inaugurated in 1891 as a promenade for the coffee barons, who built eclectic mansions there to escape the heat of the city centre, the avenue lived its second incarnation from the 1960s onwards, when the mansions came down to make way for bank towers. For three decades, Paulista was synonymous with capital, in both senses of the word. It was where the country’s money woke up early.
Until the money moved out. From the 1990s, financial headquarters migrated a few kilometres away, to Avenida Brigadeiro Faria Lima — a tropical Canary Wharf of mirrored towers and people in gilets riding electric scooters, a fauna of its own that the city has nicknamed “farialimers”.
Paulista, widowed of its bankers, could have withered. It did the opposite, turning itself into an avenue of more democratic common use. And now it is consolidating a third incarnation: that of South America’s great cultural corridor. The irony is that a relevant part of this metamorphosis is being financed by the very banks and financial fortunes that left.
The most recent example is the most telling. Nubank, a digitally born fintech valued at tens of billions of dollars, has announced the August opening of the Nubank Arte Lab, on the first floor of the Conjunto Nacional, a modernist “vertical city block” that is the commercial soul of the avenue. It will offer 2,700 square metres of immersive galleries, with a ten-metre LED wall, a mirrored ceiling and a design by the architecture firm Jacobsen Arquitetura.
The opening show, “The World of Tarsila”, promises to be the largest immersive experience ever devoted to Tarsila do Amaral, launching the celebrations of the 140th birthday of the painter who gave Brazilian modernism its face. A telling detail of the new times: the bank did not build the space — it merely bought the naming rights, the way one christens a stadium.
Days earlier, Itaú, the country’s largest private bank and now the owner of Faria Lima’s most expensive building, announced that Itaú Cultural, for three decades at 149 Avenida Paulista, will get a new building at number 1,267, next to Fiesp’s pyramid. The 19-storey vertical cultural centre, designed by Estúdio Módulo and budgeted at R$ 340 million — with no tax-incentive money, the Itaú Foundation is keen to stress — is due for delivery in 2031. The ground floor will be an open plaza, with no turnstiles, paved in Portuguese stone, like an extension of the pavement.
A few blocks away, the Instituto Moreira Salles, created by the founding family of Unibanco, now part of Itaú, has already proved that the formula works: since 2017, its elevated box of glass and concrete, by the architects Andrade Morettin, has become a pilgrimage site for photography lovers.
All of this orbits the original star: MASP, the São Paulo Museum of Art, founded in 1947 by the press magnate Assis Chateaubriand, whose suspended free span, designed by Lina Bo Bardi, scandalised and enchanted the city in 1968. In March 2025, the museum doubled in size with the Pietro Maria Bardi annexe, a 14-storey tower clad in perforated metal and linked to the historic building by a tunnel. The financing brought together some of the most influential names in Brazilian business and finance, including families associated with Itaú Unibanco, such as the Setubals and Brachers; BTG Pactual, such as the Esteves family; Porto, such as the Garfinkels; and Bradesco, such as the Aguiars, among other private donors.
Add Japan House, designed by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, plus Casa das Rosas, Sesc Avenida Paulista and the Fiesp Cultural Centre, with its free exhibitions and constant queues, and the corridor is complete. Today one can cross the avenue’s 2.8 kilometres hopping from museum to museum like someone crossing a river stone by stone.
Why do banks do this? The question is 600 years old. The Medici, the bankers of Florence, already knew that funding Botticelli washed away the sins of usury, then condemned by the Church. Patronage buys what the balance sheet does not record: social legitimacy, family legacy and the sweet alchemy of binding a brand to national identity. There is also, of course, the earthly arithmetic of tax breaks. The phenomenon is global: Deutsche Bank ran a Guggenheim of its own in Berlin for 15 years, later rebranded the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle; JPMorgan Chase manages a corporate collection of tens of thousands of works, started by David Rockefeller in the 1950s. In France, Bernard Arnault’s Fondation Louis Vuitton and the Bourse de Commerce, turned by François Pinault into a showcase for his collection, have both been criticised for trading generous tax deductions and public concessions for monuments to their founders’ taste.
And sometimes the varnish cracks. São Paulo knows the case well: Edemar Cid Ferreira, owner of Banco Santos, presided over the São Paulo Biennial in the 1990s, bankrolled the megalomaniac Rediscovery Exhibition in 2000 and amassed a collection of thousands of works. Until, in 2004, his bank collapsed like a house of cards. The collection was seized by the courts and ended up in the custody of the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo. It was, to say the least, an awkward episode to stain the aura the patrons seek.
But perhaps the final verdict belongs not to the bankers, but to those who walk the avenue. For paulistanos and for the millions of tourists who land there, it hardly matters whether the engine is vanity, marketing or a genuine love of art: the result is a corridor of accessible culture, much of it free, in the most public space of one of the southern hemisphere’s largest metropolises. There is something poetic in the denouement. In August, Tarsila’s “Operários” — that wall of faces of the workers who helped build São Paulo — will be projected in 360 degrees at the heart of the avenue that much of financial capital traded for Faria Lima. The money changed address. Paulista kept its best inheritance.
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