Pátio do Colégio, Largo do Palácio

Abstract

The article focuses on Pátio do Colégio, one of the places that make part of São Paulo's cultural heritage, departing from the iconographic documentation concerning this area and also references to their uses and the spacial configuration in chronics and descriptions by the travellers in the period between 1860 and 1956. The visuality, a field of interaction between object, its representation and its reception, is here understood as one of the dimensions of society. From this perspective, the analysis concerns different levels of interpretation of the relations between urban space and visual documentation, starting from the idea that the urban landscapes' iconographic production is an integral and acting part in the city's social production. We try to show the way the urban images emerged from the iconographic and textual references have an active role as symptoms and vectors of the transformations occurred in the Pátio do Colégio.