Salon Art + Design 2026: A Casa Paulista: Pioneers of São Paulo Modern Interiors

But those rooms did not survive intact. Wood and iron endure — they became the material terms in which the history of Brazilian design is written. Textile did not. Worn by time, use and dust, most fabrics never made it past the bad taste of the eighties. The companies gathered here nonetheless shared a conviction: cloth was chosen with the same intention as the frame it covered, and held to the same standard. No textile, however, is built to last seventy years.

The authorship of that vanished layer was, disproportionately, female. Fayga Ostrower printed the fabric of Tenreiro's first modern armchair. Susi Aczel designed in partnership at Forma. At Branco & Preto, Irene Ruchti designed textiles that left almost no trace in the archive. The erasure was not only a matter of credit: it followed from the material itself, from the hierarchy that treated the frame as structure and the fabric as finish.

Since it was founded nine years ago, Bossa has been weaving the parts of this history back together — gathering piece by piece, reference by reference, to reconstruct and retell what Brazil made of itself in those years. Working from the same conviction that guided those rooms, the gallery selects, develops and produces fabrics by hand: textiles that carry both the history of those interiors and the history of making well.

The question this selection poses is who counts as a pioneer. Not only those who signed the wood and the iron, but those who composed the room, printed the cloth, and taught a city how to live in it.

Branco & Preto was a landmark in Brazilian modern design, bringing together technical rigor, historical context, and sensory materiality. Founded in São Paulo in 1952 by Miguel Forte, Jacob Ruchti, Plínio Croce, Roberto Aflalo, Carlos Millan, and Chen Y Hwa, the group formed a self-taught avant-garde in a moment of industrial and cultural expansion. Drawing from the rationalism of the Bauhaus and the organic principles of Frank Lloyd Wright, they addressed the absence of furniture capable of engaging with open plans and glass walls of modern architecture.

The store was not simply a store, but a design laboratory where furniture was conceived as an extension of architecture — a “total work.” The creative process was rigorously collective, developed through sketches, full-scale prototypes, and countless iterations until proportions were resolved and function prevailed over form. Their production articulated the richness of local materials with an industrial aesthetic, combining woods such as jacarandá-da-Bahia, caviúna, and pau-marfim with tubular steel, Calacatta marble, glass, Formica, horsehair, down, and wool gabardine fabrics produced by Lanifício Fileppo.

Branco & Preto also functioned as a platform for disseminating a new way of living in São Paulo, presenting interiors conceived for open spaces, vertical growth, and a cosmopolitan identity. Its trajectory came to an end in 1970, as the growing success of the partners’ individual practices, the premature death of Carlos Millan, and the scarcity of skilled labor made commercial scalability unfeasible. Its closure marked the transformation of a commercial enterprise into a design myth, leaving behind a body of work of deep cultural significance within the history of Brazilian design and architecture.

Forma S.A. consolidated the transition from handcrafted furniture to industrial-scale production in Brazil, bridging European rigor with serial manufacturing and global licensing. Its origins trace back to 1949, with the arrival of Carlo Hauner in Brazil, who acquired the assets and machinery of the Pau Brasil workshop — an early initiative by Lina Bo Bardi and Giancarlo Palanti — and transformed it, in 1950, into Móveis Artesanal. Based in Itaim Bibi, Artesanal functioned as a transitional laboratory, moving away from one-off carpentry toward a rationalist approach suited to São Paulo’s rapid vertical growth.

In 1954, the arrival of Ernesto Wolf marked a strategic turning point, leading to the name Forma. The new identity evoked geometric clarity and the intention to standardize modern design. Unlike Branco & Preto, which emphasized the “total work” and artisanal control, Forma operated through a logic of components. Designs by Martin Eisler and Carlo Hauner were based on modularity and versatility, allowing well-designed furniture to reach an unprecedented industrial scale in Brazil.

Forma’s visual identity emerged from the dialogue between the transparency of metal and the density of noble wood, with slender metal hardware, black-painted steel bars, and pieces such as the Costela Armchair. In 1959, Forma became the exclusive licensee of Knoll International in Brazil, implementing international quality control standards. Its stores operated as extensions of museums, integrating furniture, modern art, and carefully selected objects. Forma demonstrated that high-level design could be systematized and internationalized, leaving pieces that endure as evidence of the meeting point between craftsmanship and industrial production.