Edifício Itahy — Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro

About the building

The Itahy sits at Avenida Nossa Senhora de Copacabana 252, near the Lido stretch at the Leme end of the neighborhood. Built in 1932 to a design by Arnaldo Gladosch, it is one of the buildings people point to when they talk about Art Deco in Copacabana — the entrance portal, added in 1935 by the painter and sculptor Pedro Luiz Correia de Araújo, is framed by a carved mermaid and is one of the most photographed doorways in Rio.

Inside the Deco detailing continues: the lobby floor mosaics are laid in a wave pattern that nods to the beach two blocks away. Apartments are the compact, high-ceilinged type of early-1930s Copacabana, and the address puts you within a short walk of the Cardeal Arcoverde metro station and the quieter Lido end of the beach.

Address: Av. Nossa Senhora de Copacabana 252, Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro

History

The Itahy went up in 1932, in the first wave of apartment buildings that turned Copacabana from a low-rise beach suburb into a city neighborhood. Its name means 'small stone' in Tupi — part of a 1930s fashion for giving Deco buildings Indigenous names, the same family of buildings as the Guahy and Itaoca nearby.

The mermaid portal came three years after the building itself, commissioned from Pedro Luiz Correia de Araújo in 1935. Nearly a century on, the facade and entrance survive largely intact, which is rarer than it should be on this avenue.