Collection of the Iconography and Museums Division, Department of Historical Heritage, São PauloThe article “Paulistano chalets”, by Eudes Campos, from the Department of Historical Heritage of the Washington Luís Historical Municipal Archive (São Paulo), studies the origin, development and decline in the urban environment of São Paulo of a type of construction called a chalet. Fruit of the Romanticism of the 19th century and very popular in the last third of the 1800s the chalet assumes a highly symbolic value – although its meaning is ambiguous –, because it is linked both to the notion of an idealized country life and that of the technical modernity, which was then being introduced into São Paulo. It became popular because it was easy to import the industrialized construction material and expanded during the wave of construction that hit Sao Paulo as from 1875. At the end of the Empire it was the object of restrictive municipal measures because its proliferation in the city’s urban space was considered outside the rules. From the beginning of the 20th century the transformation of taste, urban reforms then being carried out in the center of the city (1902-1914) and the desire to construct a new urban Center, in accordance with the system of values and interests of hegemonic layers contributed to its gradual disappearance.
Annals of the Paulista Museum: History and Material culture – v. 16 – nº 1 – São Paulo – Jan./June. 2008
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