Museu da Casa Brasileira, São Paulo

The Museu da Casa Brasileira, an institution of the Secretariat of Culture and Creative Economy of the State of São Paulo, is dedicated to the issues of the Brazilian home through architecture and design. Over its more than five decades of existence, it has become a national and international reference in these areas by promoting programs such as the MCB Design Award, a competition created in 1986 with the aim of encouraging Brazilian production in the segment, and the Houses of Brazil project, to rescue and preserve the memory of the diversity of Brazilian housing.

The MCB's program includes temporary exhibitions and an agenda based on debates, lectures and publications that contextualize the museum's vocation for architecture and design, contributing to the formation of critical thinking on diverse themes such as urbanism, housing, creative economy, urban mobility and sustainability. The museum dedicates its space to two long-term exhibitions: Remanescentes da Mata Atlântica & Acervo MCB, with photographic and textual panels that correlate the various typologies of wood in the MCB's collection to the various native species existing in the Atlantic forest, as well as presenting a cut of the institution's collection consisting of furniture and objects representative of the Brazilian home from the 17th century to the present, and The House and the City - Crespi Prado Collection, which addresses the residential use of the property that now houses the museum through the daily life and trajectory of its original residents: the couple Renata Crespi and Fábio Prado, protagonists of historical, cultural and urbanistic transformations in the city of São Paulo.

In the digital version, the MCB makes available to the public a detailed survey of information related to the habits of private life since the 16th century in Brazil. The database Equipamentos da Casa Brasileira, Usos e Costumes - Arquivo Ernani Silva Bruno brings 28 thousand files containing travelers' reports, fictional literature, family inventories, and wills that reveal cultural habits of the Brazilian household. Coordinated by historiographer Ernani Silva Bruno, the MCB's first director, the work, known as Arquivo Ernani, is organized into 24 themes, including food, construction, household customs, furniture, and others, and is part of the museum's archival collection.

The institution invests in educational extension activities, with attention to special audiences and in the development of techniques and support material for both guided tours and spontaneous audiences. The cultural agenda also highlights the Music at the MCB project, which brings free music presentations on Sunday mornings from March to December. All these actions represent a remarkable growth in the museum's agenda and the gradual evolution of the number of visitors, to levels higher than 100 thousand annual visitors.

The MCB was created in 1970 as the Museum of Brazilian Artistic and Historical Furniture, a member of the State Government's museum network, linked to the Secretariat of Culture. In 1972, it got its definitive headquarters, a neoclassical manor house built between 1942 and 1945, originally to house the former mayor of São Paulo Fábio da Silva Prado and his wife Renata Crespi Prado. The architectural project, designed by Wladimir Alves de Souza, is based on the lines of the Imperial Palace in Petrópolis. Its construction is part of the urban expansion of the first half of the 20th century in São Paulo, when the city's elite left the center to live near the Pinheiros River.

The couple lived in the house for 18 years and turned it into a center for large official receptions. After the death of Fábio Prado, who left no heirs, Renata Crespi moved out of the house, and in 1968 donated the property to the Padre Anchieta Foundation. In turn, the Foundation loaned the building to the Secretariat of Culture of the State of São Paulo.