Saturday was a lazy, overcast day spent mostly with the Finotti family. Leonardo, Michelle, Gu, Mariana and I went for breakfast at Galeria dos Pães, a 24-hour, busy bakery, café and restaurant in Jardins. I then walked with Michelle along Rua Óscar Freire, the shopping street of choice for the well-to-do Paulistanos. Michelle had worked in the studio that redesigned the street a few years ago, and told me how they buried electrical cables and tried to format things like manholes and sidewalk heights and widths. Flagship stores for Brazilian brands such as Richards, Forum, Melissa and Havaianas share the street and with other international big fashion names.

This area could also be called Isay Weinfeld neighbourhood, for many of the stores, galleries and restaurants were designed by his architectural practise – and many of them were later shot by Leonardo. My favourite is Livraria da Vila, in Alameda Lorena, pictured above, where I ordered (following Rodrigo Almeida’s suggestion) Lina Bo Bardi’s Tempos de Grossura. The bookshop is a few metres away from the Passado Composto gallery, where Michelle and I saw some of the pieces of the “Sempre Modernos” show that finished this week.

We later went to the neighbourhood of Higienópolis, dodging the traditional long lines at Jardim de Napoli, the famous “home of the Polpettone”, by starting to eat lunch at 3h30pm. Then we drove around the neighbourhood and the centre of São Paulo, looking at architecture – from Niemeyer’s Copan building to old mansions and Paulo Mendes da Rocha’s Patriarca Square.

Last night I called Daniel Trench to check where we could meet up for a drink, and he happened to be in Bar Balcão, just 2 blocks from the Finottis – with whom I’m staying. Talk about small world. As the name says, this corner bar has one long and winding counter, and you drink your choppe (in the case of Daniel’s group of friends, a total of 88 chopps) and eat sandwiches sitting on high stools. One of Daniel’s friends is Sara Goldschmit, also a graphic designer and a writer and blogger; Sara actually visited the D-Crit department late last year for one of our lectures, but we never actually met. The three of us had a great talk on graphic design in Brazil, criticism,writing, teaching, practise, travel…

Yesterday’s most memorable talk at the MOB Design Conference was given by Susan Andrews of the Visão Futuro Institute, a non-profit based in the state of São Paulo dedicated to the study and promotion of happiness. There was a whole panel of the conference dedicated to the study of happiness and GHP, or Gross Happiness Product – in Portuguese, Felicidade Interna Bruta. Quite appropriate in our “Post-Economic” era, too. Brazil was said to be a country with highly valuable human (and happiness) capital, and an inspiration for the rest of the world (following the world’s own kingdom of happiness, Bhutan). Susan Andrews is also organising the next world conference on happiness, to take place in November in Foz do Iguaçu. Other speakers on the panel spoke of how GDP is a wrong index to measure progress, of the symbolic and intangible nature of design and culture, and of what really makes us happy (not stuff, but healthy, lasting human connections).

Later in the day, I attended the opening for Patrick Jouin’s retrospective exhibition at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake called “Patrick Jouin’s Paris”. Talk about a change of scenery and tone. While his work undoubtedly makes people happy, there was no “post economy” discourse there. Lots of crystals, sleek furniture (including his remarkable rapid prototyping pieces), a concept room for W Hotels (shot after the opening by my friend Leonardo Finotti, who I’m staying with here in São Paulo, the reason we only left the Institute well after 1am), a house in Kuala Lumpur, restaurants for Alain Ducasse (from the Eiffel Tower to Las Vegas) and the like. This exhibition, like Jouin’s work, is “pre-post economic era” design – French style – at its best.