Casa do Bandeirante (Butantã) / Museu da Cidade de São Paulo

This guide to the Casa do Bandeirante in São Paulo follows architect Luís Saia's 1953 restoration of a crumbling rammed-earth farmhouse near Praça Monteiro Lobato, timed to open for the city's four-hundredth birthday. No document ever tied any bandeirante, the frontiersmen who pushed the colonial frontier inland, to this particular house, yet the commission renamed it anyway and filled its rooms with colonial furniture borrowed from as far as Minas Gerais. The walls themselves are taipa de pilão, rammed earth pounded between wooden forms, five and a half meters tall and half a meter thick. Stand close to them and feel the real, sweating labor of an eighteenth-century household, whoever they actually were.