Jeronimo Faria Lima, a Perkins&Will office tower with a garden level in São Paulo

Most corporate towers keep the street at arm's length. Jeronimo Faria Lima, designed by Perkins&Will at the corner of Brigadeiro Faria Lima Avenue and Jeronimo da Veiga Street in São Paulo, tries to do the opposite, drawing the city's public life down and into the building through a sunken plaza, a pedestrian bridge and a raised garden.

The plaza sits on the first basement level, with cafés, places to sit and shared work areas. From there a bridge carries you to the main lobby, so the walk from pavement to tower happens in stages rather than through a single door. Glass enclosures, continuous finishes and lined-up sightlines keep the inside and outside in view of each other.

Higher up, the tower is split into two stacked blocks by a planted garden floor, which breaks up its height and brings greenery into a dense part of the city. Planting runs from the entrance to the terraces. The glass facade carries screen-printed patterns that stress its vertical lines and shift with the daylight, and some ceiling junctions at the edges were cut and fitted by hand.

The project reached designboom through its reader submissions feature. Worth a look if you're near Faria Lima and curious how an office building can share its ground floor.

Our summary of a story from designboom, published 13 October 2026. Read the original