Art in Residence - NYTimes.com Undulating and forbidding, Oscar Niemeyer's 1966 Edifício Copan in the heart of downtown São Paulo is one of the largest residential buildings in the world. It is home to thousands of people, about 70 businesses, and, as of September, a contemporary art center, Pivô. "The space was abandoned for the last 20 years," says the artist Fernanda Brenner, who founded Pivô with a small team that includes the art historian Marta Ramos and the producer Tyaga Sa Brito. The labyrinthine layout, pieced together from a former storage space, a dental clinic and a storefront, may have made the location a hard sell, but at 38,000 square feet, it is an interesting place to display artwork. For the first round of shows, Pivô enlisted two local galleries and an independent curator to present projects that largely respond to or intervene with the architecture of the site. "Pivô is dedicated to process and experimentation rather than to finished products," Brenner says, "and to promoting a dialogue between contemporary art and its place in the city."