Edifício Copan

This vast residential block designed by Oscar Niemeyer is one of São Paulo's most recognisable buildings, its sinuous wave-shaped facade completed in the 1960s. Rows of horizontal brise-soleil ripple across the curving front, and the structure contains more than a thousand apartments over thirty-plus floors. At ground level a curving gallery of shops and cafés threads beneath the building. Long a symbol of the city's mid-century ambition and dense urban life, it remains fully inhabited and much studied.