Step inside Eduardo Longo’s utopian spherical home during Aberto5 in Brazil

In the 1970s, the Brazilian architect Eduardo Longo imagined a utopian urban community in which people would live in spherical silver pods suspended above the street in wire meshes. These capsule high-rises have yet to come to fruition, but Casa Bola, the radical prototype he built for himself and his family above his home/office in São Paulo, will be open to visitors for the first time from 7 March until 31 May 2026 as part of Aberto, an exhibition platform for contemporary art and design. Viewers’ journey around it will be enlightened by artworks made in response to the building and its inimitable creator.

Tour Eduardo Longo’s home at Aberto5

Longo, who is now 83, was drawn to the idea of spherical buildings while he was exploring the ideal unit that could be industrially produced. ‘The sphere is the lightest volume possible, and that fascinated me,’ he explains. ‘My dream was to create very light modular houses that could even be transported by air.’

The architect, a self-described urban hippy, was reacting to what he anticipated as a shift in urban life. ‘I believed spherical homes were the future because I felt that people would gradually live with fewer possessions and in a simpler way,’ he says. ‘Cities already offer many things without the need to own them personally, so I imagined a lifestyle that is lighter – both materially and architecturally.’

Longo built his prototype between 1974 and 1979 by hand using ferrocement, moulded over a mesh of recycled steel tubes, which also formed the continuous structure of the walls, built-in furniture, light fixtures and toilets. He moved in with his wife and two children, living there until a year or so ago, when he moved back down the stairs – or the spiral escape slide, perhaps.

Despite its compact form, Longo says the 8m-diameter structure in the Itaim Bibi district was well suited to everyday family life: ‘It was simply a home – comfortable, practical, and lived in like any other.’ Bedrooms and storage spaces were in the lower part of the sphere, with the entrance, kitchen and dining spaces in the middle, and the main living areas at the top, with large windows looking out across the city.

Casa Bola defied the transparency and structural rationalism that shaped much of Brazilian modernist architecture at the time. This rebellion was part of the draw for Aberto founder Filipe Assis, who has held previous editions of the fair in private homes by Oscar Niemeyer, Vilanova Artigas, Tomie Ohtake and Chu Ming Silveira. ‘We wanted to find an inventive piece of counter-culture, experimental architecture, and Casa Bola was exactly that,’ says São Paulo-born Assis, who recalls how, as a child, he would often ask his parents to drive past this curious marvel on the rooftop.

Most of the works by 50 Brazilian and international artists in the fifth edition of Aberto have been specially commissioned for the exhibition. ‘Everything Eduardo created had humour to it, even the brutalist villas he designed before Casa Bola,’ explains Assis, referring to one with a chimney that is shaped like a hand making a ‘call me’ gesture. ‘Some of the artists have responded to this.’

Luiz Zerbini, for example, has painted a canvas with trippy spherical motifs and psychedelic colours, calling the work A fantástica viagem de Eduardo Longo (‘The fantastic journey of Eduardo Longo’), while other paintings by Laís Amaral, Paloma Bosquê, and Tatiana Chalhoub riff on the building’s curves and angles. A mobile sculpture by Laura Lima nods to Longo’s frequent use of found materials. ‘He was the king of improvisation,’ says Assis.

Some of the architect’s own unusual assemblages will be spread around the white interiors of Casa Bola, such as a lamp incorporating retro 3D glasses and a plant pot sprouting a ‘flower’ made from a glove, making a thumbs-up sign. ‘He didn’t intentionally make them as sculptures, but that’s what they are,’ says the Aberto founder. Aberto has also collaborated with Etel to reissue the metal chairs that Longo designed for the house, with balls for feet to stop them scratching the floor.

While visitors can explore the spherical house, most of the furniture and artworks, from galleries including Mendes Wood DM, Luisa Strina and Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, will be displayed in the gallery space in one of the Longo-designed buildings beneath. Some of his sketches, models and works – curated by Fernando Serapião – will give further insight into his mind. ‘Eduardo Longo is a rare architect who pushed his vision to the extreme, much like a visual artist, transcending the conventional boundaries of architecture,’ says Serapião.

In Longo’s imagination, the spherical modules would be used for both high-rise and long-rise buildings. ‘I was fascinated by the idea that when spherical modules are placed together, they naturally maintain separation between units. This allows air, light, and vision to pass through,’ he says.

While society may not have been ready for this reinvention of city life in the 1970s and 1980s, visitors to Aberto5 can glimpse what they’ve been missing – or what may still be to come.

Aberto5 is on show at Casa Bola, 7 March – 31 May 2026, in São Paulo, Brazil, aberto.art