All-aboard for the sala Sao Paulo.

• Author: Holston, Mark
• Position: !Ojo!

THE JULIO PRESTES Railway Station in Sao Paulo, Brazil, may be the only train terminal in the world that can boast of two types of conductors. One, wearing a military-style uniform adorned with brass buttons with a whistle at his lips, keeps the trains running on time. But the other, attired in stately formal wear with a baton in hand, has a distinctly different mission--counting time for a major symphony orchestra.

Since 1999, this landmark edifice in one of the city's most historic neighborhoods has served the dual purpose of rail transportation hub and home of the State Symphony Orchestra of Sao Paulo, one of South America's most prestigious orchestras. But the project of converting half of the seven-decade-old ornate building from a rundown relic of a bygone era into a world-class concert space involved engineering and architectural considerations as challenging as the orchestral complexity of a Mahler symphony.

The coffee boom of the early 1900s produced great wealth in Sao Paulo and fostered an interest in funding grandiose architectural projects. One was building a new terminal for the Sorocabana Railroad, an important conduit for shipping coffee beans from the interior of the state to the city. A young architect, Christiano Stockler das Neves, who had graduated a decade earlier from the University of Pennsylvania, was selected to design the new terminal. His vision was an elegant three-story structure that incorporated what Das Neves called a "modernized Louis XVI style" that he believed would be well received by Sao Paulo's conservative social elite.

The international financial crisis of 1929 delayed work on the station, which was finally completed in 1938. Its importance as a part of Sao Paulo's transportation network was relatively short lived and train service, for both passengers and freight, began to fall out of favor as the country started aggressively expanding its highway system. At the same time, the Campo Elisios neighborhood surrounding the station slowly began to deteriorate, further casting a shadow over what had for a brief time been one of the city's most attractive public buildings.

When the State Symphony Orchestra of Sao Paulo (OSESP--Orquestra Sinfonica do Estado de Sao Paulo) was established in 1953, its founders could never have dreamed that their institution's destiny would one day be intertwined with a fallen-from-grace train terminal located in a decaying, unfashionable district of the city. But by the early...