Copan

This guide to Edifício Copan in São Paulo starts with a puzzle: census takers count just over two thousand residents, but people in the lobby will tell you five thousand live here. It traces Oscar Niemeyer's wave-shaped tower back to 1952, when ground broke on a building meant to mark the city's four-hundredth birthday, and to the fourteen years of stalled construction that followed as his Rio-mailed drawings met engineers who built it their own way. Six curved blocks hold eleven hundred sixty apartments behind a single sinuous facade, wrapped around shared elevators and a building manager residents have nicknamed the mayor since 1993. Best taken in from across the street, where the full curve comes into view.